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Guardians of the Galaxy 2 Review

What I liked: Baby Groot is the best thing about this movies. If you have seen the trailer with the extended conversation between Rocket the raccoon and baby Groot about when to push the detonation button, you have seen the best of the movie and if you're pressed for time, can probably leave it at that. If you have more time you could expand your viewing to include the opening fight scene, with some pretty awesome alien smashing action, rainbows, and classic rock music, and the concluding fight scene, which involves baby Groot, explosions, and Pacman. If you really want to branch out you can watch a fight scene in the middle that mostly involves about 100 mercenaries being beaten by a raccoon in the woods. I liked that Rocky has moved on from his boxing career to being an intergalactic criminal, it really seems like a step up. I predict that in the next movie he will be the underdog in a boxing match with an alien and will make an incredible comeback to win. I liked that the bad guys' whole space ship fleet was just an arcade game. If my experience in flight simulators is any indication, this is not a very effective military. I have decided that the firework funeral is the best plan ever. I hope my wake will consist of nothing but millions of fireworks.

What I didn't: First and foremost the music was not as good. There is a lot of cool classic rock music they really could have picked better songs. The evil master plan is dumb both in premise and execution. Evil villains these days, the all want to rule the universe. Can't they just try and rob a bank or something? Build a cool death ray? You may remember from the last movie that this group of heroes is made up entirely of scoundrels: assassins, thieves, bounty hunters, mercenaries, etc. It seems to be one of the goals of this movie to remind us that these heroes are bad people. They succeed rather gruesomely. Most of what made the first movie funny was that the jokes were unexpected and well timed. Instead of coming up with more clever or unexpected ideas the writers just expanded the jokes they made the first time. So, there were more inappropriate jokes, more awkward statements, and more random things that happened. But since it was all more of the same none of it was unexpected and so it lost most of the comic effectiveness. The other thing that the first movie had going for it was that it really didn't take itself too seriously. This one tries to be a little bit profound which really works against the whole silly nonsense thing they had going. So, it is mostly nonsense but not good at being silly.

Who should watch this? If you liked the first one, you will like this one, it's more of the same. If you didn't like the first one, you won't like this one, it's more of the same.

Would I watch it again? I'd rather watch the first one but there are scenes from this one that I will find online.

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