Hot Take: The first Guardians was only good because…

I still think GOTG 2 was alright. Nowhere near as good as the first one but not terrible. But yeah, he's been on a downward trajectory here, with Suicide Squad being unwatchable trash. I also worry about GOTG 3. We actually care about these characters, shock value deaths with no real purpose to anything transpiring on screen will be tough to stomach.

I didn't know that.

GOTG2 was more polished than SS2 but it does have the same feel and flow to it. Both were nowhere near as tight and cohesive as the first GOTG. If you're saying that GOTG had a different writer but Gunn was the one who penned GOTG2 and SS2 then that might explain it.

I actually do think GOTG2 has more in common with SS2 than it did with the first GOTG.

While the first GOTG movie had a light, humorous tone, it still took itself seriously. GOTG2 and TSS have this trippy, wacky, almost irreverent feel to it that makes them a few clicks short of a parody. Not quite but almost. It's the same issue that Deadpool2 had. So yeah, I'd hate for GOTG3 to go the same route. Not that GOTG2 and TSS were bad movies, far from it, but they certainly weren't as good as the reviews are saying and definitely nowhere near as good as the first GOTG. 

I mean, to be fair, when you have a property with a dark premise that has ‘suicide’ in the title, something like that is difficult to avoid. 

Well, the movie is a lot more cartoony and over the top than Saving Private Ryan. It leans pretty heavily into comic book absurdity. It just has a crude sense of humor to it, which is to be expected from James Gunn. I’m actually not the biggest fan of Gunn’s brand of humor either, but I knew what to expect from his take of the Suicide Squad.

The pandemic and HBOMAX kind of ruined any hopes of a decent box office.  But you're spot on.  The R rating had Gunn thinking of all the things he could do from a crassness standpoint instead of from a storytelling standpoint.  "How man dick jokes and exploding faces can I put into this movie," shouldn't be the focal point of the creative process.  

Another thing that can't be stressed enough is how much emphasis they put on the ridiculousness.  You look at GOTG and it has a talking raccoon and a talking tree- and the tree only repeats one line; yet through the course of that movie, the tree displays more personality and certainly more heart than anything we get in Suicide Squad.  "We are Groot," or Peter remembering his mother's final words in his moment of need; those scenes pack so much emotion into them because the characters have earned it despite being goofy.  The story captured their humanity in a way SS never did with anyone at all.  They're just a bunch of idiots.  Oh, I guess I'm supposed to feel an emotional attachment to Bloodsport because he exchanged f bombs with his daughter for a minute and a half.    

Even GOTG 2 had great stuff like Yondu's death or dingbat Mantis touching a smiling Drax and crying after feeling his inner pain.  It's just amazing to me that the same guy directed those two movies and then directed SS.  A bunch of soulless shitheads running around a vapid script until the credits roll.  There is one solitary great line in SS: the Starro army as it collapses, revealing his inner thoughts, "I was happy floating in space," or something to that effect.  But the moment doesn't work because he's just been a mindless creature up until that point, and the rest of the cast are maniacs without any real motivation or depth. 

It's as if Gunn didn't know or didn't care what he was going to do with this project.  It really does feel like a spoof of itself.