Guardians of the Galaxy | Film review - Fizzing action, snarky banter

Buoyed along by snarky banter and breezy 1970s pop, this freewheeling Marvel Comics movie is a giddily entertaining sci-fi romp about a misfit band of vagabonds and freaks who stumble into a quest to save the galaxy from destruction.

Chris Pratt’s swaggering space adventurer, Peter Quill, the group’s self-appointed leader, sets Guardians of the Galaxy’s tone from the start. Abducted from Earth as a boy in 1988 and raised by intergalactic mercenaries, he is a cocky, charismatic outlaw in the Han Solo mould and gets in and out of scrapes by means of bluster and bravado rather than especially quick wits.

His most treasured possessions are a battered, outlandishy out-of-place Walkman and a mixtape that preserves the pop songs of his beloved dead mother’s youth (hence the presence of such cheesy, naggingly memorable numbers as ‘Hooked on a Feeling’ and ‘The Pina Colada Song’ on the soundtrack).

'I am Groot'

For reasons too complicated and confusing to go into here (believe me; it doesn’t matter), he winds up in a scuzzy space prison in the company of a bunch of bad-asses and wise-asses: green-skinned alien Gamora (Zoë Saldana, no stranger to playing weirdly pigmented extraterrestrials), tattooed, slow-on-the-uptake hulk Drax the Destroyer (ex-wrestler Dave Bautista), and a sarcastic talking raccoon named Rocket (Bradley Cooper) and his sidekick Groot (Vin Diesel), a walking tree whose vocabulary is limited to the three words ‘I am Groot’.

For reasons even more complicated and confusing (it still doesn’t matter), this oddball crew bands together to retrieve an all-powerful orb and stop it falling into the hands of xenocidal bad guy Ronan the Accuser (Lee Pace). ‘This orb has a real shiny blue suitcase, Ark of the Covenant, Maltese Falcon sort of vibe… what is it?’ queries Peter, tipping us the wink that the plot is just a marvellous excuse for fizzing CGI-boosted action and larky, tongue-in-cheek badinage.

Certificate 12A. Runtime 121 mins. Director James Gunn.

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A film critic for over 25 years, Jason admits the job can occasionally be glamorous – sitting on a film festival jury in Portugal; hanging out with Baz Luhrmann at the Chateau Marmont; chatting with Sigourney Weaver about The Archers – but he mostly spends his time in darkened rooms watching films. He’s also written theatre and opera reviews, two guide books on Rome, and competed in a race for Yachting World, whose great wheeze it was to send a seasick film critic to write about his time on the ocean waves. But Jason is happiest on dry land with a classic screwball comedy or Hitchcock thriller.