I've had a hard time motivating myself to write review, not because of a lack of passion regarding the genre du jour that is the modern super hero movie, believe me I have so much to say and so many ways to say it. Nor is it a fear of coming off bitter and jilted, quite frankly many will simply write me off as such regardless of how vicious or tepid my critiques of the film at hand are. So I will simply say, I have seen this film before. While that is not a bad thing necessarily, I do believe it to be quite indicative of the genre at hand reaching its creative limit and perhaps it says more about my attitude about towards the modern trend of deconstruction as a whole, but I've seen this before. Perhaps it is because this film is piggybacking off of one of the worst Hollywood trends in recent memory, that of the soft reboot, but again I've seen this film before. For all the praise this film gets for being "adult", fun and competently made it does not change the fact that this film is simply a rehash of James Gunn's previous work on the Guardians of The Galaxy flicks only this time with a lot less of the charm and a whole lot more of the word fuck. I do not think this a bad film by any means, you could waste two hours of your life watching far worse, but it's a great statement about how far we've come in the genre when a film merely creeps towards average and gets praised for doing so. I don't wish to harp on this for too much and believe it or not I don't dislike James Gunn's work as a whole (Scooby Doo scripts not included), I do however want to see him move beyond the super hero genre once and for all, I think he has better films in him and more importantly I think he's made far better films. The same goes Idris Elba, Joel Kinnaman (go watch The Killing) and Margo Robbie. I'm sure that I'll receive some blow back from this or possibly get some that talk about how great an adaptation this was or how I'm underselling the work of one the few modern geniuses in Hollywood, but I couldn't care less and if you're being honest with yourself you couldn't either, one look at the film's box office will tell you that. If you enjoyed it more power to you, as a dear friend of mine likes to say it is ok to be ok with ok movies, I'll take it one step further and say it's ok to be ok with less than ok movies, but going forward my response to the latest two hour cgi, music video video, slow motion extravaganza disguised as a superhero movie will be something along the lines of this. Kick it Cyrano!
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