The Guardians Superheroes movie review: Not even a poor man's Avengers
Good artists borrow and great artists steal, or so the saying goes. And the makers of Guardians The Superheroes clearly took the saying to heart as they borrowed and stole from every superhero movie and videogame ever.
The movie steals key elements from Prince of Persia, Iron Man, The Fantastic Four, Power Rangers, Avengers, X-Men and even borrows its name from Guardians of the Galaxy. However, none of that adds any value that can salvage this terrible movie.
Guardians is actually a Russian movie that only made its way to Indian cinemas thanks to an India-Russia cultural pact that was signed last year. While I'm all for improved relations with other countries, the pact should be junked if this is the sort of stuff Russia is sending us. Either that or we send Russia all the MSG movies so far, because Guardians is a film that doesn't belong on the big screen.
In fact, the film is reminiscent of the movie Be Kind Rewind, where Jack Black and Mos Def go around remaking big budget films with a camcorder and cheap props. While they didn't attempt a superhero flick, Guardians is what would have happened if they did.
Copy cats
The movie is centered around a Russian Avengers-styled superhero team, the Guardians. Consisting of Ler, the Magneto of rocks, Arsus, a mix of Bear and Gun Jack from Tekken, Kseniya, a knock off Invisible Woman, and Khan, an emo Prince of Persia/Winter Soldier.
The team is assembled by a SHIELD-ripoff agency named Patriot, who created them years ago, to battle a super villain named August Kuratov, a former Patriot scientist, who's now a large, hulking mutant with a device that allows him to control machines.
The movie is an attempt to capitalise on the massive popularity of the superhero genre and tries to incorporate as many of the genre's tropes as possible in the misguided belief that it is the presence of these tropes rather than the quality of their execution that determines a movie's success.
As a result, we get rushed, woefully under explained origin stories, in the opening credits itself, followed by a half-baked montage of the team being located and assembled, which happens in under two minutes despite all the superheroes supposedly being in hiding.
Who talks like that?
Maybe it's because the movie is dubbed from Russian, but it's hard to imagine that dialogue this bad could be anything but clunky and clumsy. Sample this:
A: You've helped me discover that dignity can be discovered with friendship.
B: That discovery can only happen with real friends.
Yes, Russia is a very different country, but does anyone anywhere speak like that? Apparently the movie's scriptwriter does, because the entire movie is filled with lines like that.
The plot makes convenient but unexplained jumps to resolve any and all conflict and the result is a movie that manages to be overwhelmingly underwhelming.
What's worse is that the movie ends with the assurance that there will be a sequel. Worse still, the briefest of research shows that the sequel will have a distinct Chinese tinge, making this the biggest blow to the image of Communism since Stalin.
Rating: 1/5
