GUARDIANS OF THE GALAXY VOL. 2

          A lot of the things that made the first Guardians movie so fun & special is back in this sequel. The cool characters, the comedic moments, and even those enjoyable songs. I can concur with a lot of the critics' sentiment that this is not as good a movie as the first one, but the qualities that it carry still made it the Guardians of the Galaxy movie we all expected, and I had lots of fun with it.

              Even from the opening sequence, you can already see what the film is all about. It immediately catches the attention and tells people that this is indeed James Gunn's Guardians of the Galaxy movie. And the song in play was a song that I ended up really enjoying, and that opening sequence was easily a highlight of the film for me. The rest of the film is, as you might expect, peppered with these classic songs. I have to say that most of them didn't really stuck in my mind, but when they do...they do. The aforementioned opening sequence song is one of them.

               But excellent songs aside, the best thing about this franchise are the great characters like Peter Quill, Drax, Rocket...who all have very distinct & unique personalities. Like Peter Quill & Rocket who are the more rash & carefree of the group, while Drax & Mantis are the more innocent & literal. The interactions between these kind of characters are just super fun to watch (and most of the time, hilarious). Not to mention the addition of the super cute & innocent Baby Groot. As you might expect, he steals a few scenes all on his own. But the one character that really stood out, for me, was Yondu. Michael Rooker brings the charisma to the character, but also a performance that is more than what we had seen from the first movie.

                A very shallow criticism on the movie is that it lacks the action sequences. And even when there are action sequences, there isn't too much of it. But I can accept that because it usually is to accommodate James Gunn's directing style which ends up making the scene comedic. In fact, I loved them. But a deeper criticism would be that the film lacks an active & purposeful plot. For quite a while in the middle of the film, our characters are just whiling away without any real sense of purpose. I can understand why it happened, but in watching the movie, it gets a little boring. Until such time when a certain action kicked off the final act, the plot was moving quite rather slowly without anything particularly appealing happening.

               But apart from that rather dull part of the film, I really enjoyed the rest of the film. The first act of the film was just classic Guardians of the Galaxy and a lot of fun to watch, while the last 30-40 mins was a very solid final act with some great action & humour, and some dramatic weight, too. Overall, a decent quality sequel, but one that I personally loved a lot.

VERDICT: 74 / 100

               To put this easily, this film is not as well structured as its predecessors, but apart from that less intriguing part in the middle of the film, remains very much the fun & enjoyable Guardians of the Galaxy movie that fans will come to expect...