Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2

James Gunn’s second Guardians film opens in Missouri in 1980, with a young man driving a young woman through the trees, and then jumps thirty-four years to a battle with a many-toothed thing on a golden planet, during which a tiny tree dances to Electric Light Orchestra and the fight goes on behind him, unwatched. Gunn wants to tell us where Peter Quill (Chris Pratt) came from, and he wants to keep the jokes and the songs that made the first one a surprise. He manages the songs and the jokes. The story is thinner than he thinks, and he stretches it across 137 minutes regardless.

The setup is quick. The Sovereign, a gold-skinned people ruled by Ayesha (Elizabeth Debicki), hire the Guardians to protect some batteries; Rocket (Bradley Cooper) steals a few on the way out; the Sovereign fleet gives chase; a stranger destroys it and the Guardians crash. The stranger is Ego (Kurt Russell), who says he is Quill’s father, has a soft-voiced empath called Mantis (Pom Klementieff) at his elbow, and would like his son to come home. Ayesha then hires Yondu (Michael Rooker) to fetch the thieves, and Yondu’s own crew, led by Taserface (Chris Sullivan), have views about how soft he has gone.

It is the best-looking of these films. Scott Chambliss builds Ego’s planet out of pastel bubbles, glass fronds and a palace that seems to have been blown rather than built, and puts the Sovereign in a gold so total that Judianna Makovsky’s costumes and the walls behind them are the same colour. Henry Braham shoots it all saturated, purples against ambers, pink skies, stars in every window, and holds his frames long enough for us to see what the money bought. It is a great deal to look at. Twenty minutes in we found ourselves wanting a plain grey room.

The people hold it up. Michael Rooker’s Yondu, a blue kidnapper with a whistle-guided arrow, is the film’s best performance, hurt and mean and funnier than his lines. His scenes with Rocket are the reason the film exists: two men who insult anyone who comes near them, each seeing the trick in the other. Dave Bautista plays Drax as a man who says every thought as he has it, and his double act with Klementieff’s Mantis, who has never met anyone rude before, had us laughing harder than we care to admit. He tells her she is hideous. She thanks him. We felt slightly ashamed, and then he said it again.

The trouble is the middle, on Ego’s planet, where the plot is Quill walking around with his father while everyone else waits for him to finish. Pratt and Russell are good together, two easy charmers who talk alike. But there are only so many ways to film two men in a garden, and Fred Raskin and Craig Wood, who cut the opening with such wit, have nothing to cut away to for half an hour but a ship in a forest and a quarrel. Gamora (Zoe Saldaña) and Nebula (Karen Gillan) argue about their childhoods in lines that read like case notes. Tyler Bates’s score does honest work under the fights; the songs are asked to carry feelings the script has not yet earned.

And then the last stretch happened, and it got us. We will not say how. A film we had been checking our watches through for forty minutes produced, in its final fifteen, a lump in the throat we had not braced for, and it did it with a character rather than a spectacle. We were moved, and slightly cross at how much wandering it had taken to get there.

Against the first film this is the odder, sadder sibling. That one had a plot you could say in a sentence and a team who did not yet like one another; this one has a team who like one another and say so, often, and a villain plan that turns up late and is settled with the usual noise. See it with someone who liked the first one. At home the middle can be paused for the kettle. It runs 137 minutes and carries a 12A.