Are you all familiar with Cousin Oliver Syndrome? It’s a reference to The Brady Bunch, which, with flagging ratings and an aging cast, brought in a heretofore unmentioned cute nephew named Oliver to spice things up. It didn’t work—the show was cancelled. But that didn’t stop other shows—from Growing Pains to The Cosby Show—from following suit. Guardians of the Galaxy, Vol. 2, among other things, suffers a bit from Cousin Oliver Syndrome in the form of Baby Groot. It’s not that Baby Groot isn’t cute. He is cute—“too cute to kill” as one character notes, in one of the film’s many meta jokes (indeed, it would harder to find the jokes that weren’t meta). But he’s a naked attempt to appeal to kids and sell Baby Groot action figures—particularly cynical considering that Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2 is rated PG-13.
The original Guardians of the Galaxy was fun-loving, free-wheeling, and cheeky, in a fresh sort of way. This second installment is all those things, only aggressively so. It falls into the trap so many sequels do—assuming that if we liked something in the first movie we’ll like more of it in the second. So…the contrivance of staging elaborate space fights to cheesy (but catchy!) disco and pop tunes is still funny, only less so. Same for the antics of the wise-cracking raccoon Rocket (voiced by Bradley Cooper), the merry but literally minded bruiser Drax (Dave Bautista), the cocky space gunslinger Peter Quill (Chris Pratt), and the fierce, green-hued Gamora (Zoe Saldana). But while some of the jokes land—I was especially amused by a sequence where Baby Groot (voiced by Vin Diesel) was sent on a search and rescue mission, only to bring back an assortment of useless objects including a severed thumb (!)—many of them don’t. And, thanks to the film’s maximalist tendencies, those jokes (about Rocket’s strange winking impairment, Quill’s love for David Hasselhoff, and a bad guy hi-lariously named Taserface) tend to get repeated a lot. The film’s five—yes five!—post-credit sequences (utterly skippable unless you’re a diehard, by the way) are another perfect example of this.
There are a few new characters here as well, including the always welcome Kurt Russell as a celestial warrior with a mysterious connection to Quill and a winning Pom Klementieff as the antenna-sporting empath who works for him. Michael Rooker is back as the bandit who raised Quill, as is Karen Gillan’s Nebula, Gamora’s dangerously jealous sister (the Loki, if you will, to her Thor).
Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2 is still fun, albeit in an exhausting way. Watching it is akin to the experience of being trapped in a room with a Golden Retriever that is repeatedly licking you in the face. You’ll emerge slightly happy, somewhat dazed, and covered in slobber.