Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3 (2023) review

After a sneak attack on their headquarters by "artificial human" Adam Warlock (Will Poulter) leaves Rocket (voiced by Bradley Cooper) mortally injured, the rest of the Guardians - including Star-Lord (Chris Pratt), Nebula (Karen Gillan), Drax (Dave Bautista), Mantis (Pom Klementieff) and Groot (Vin Diesel) - set out to find a cure from the company that made him (Orgocorp), reunite with Gamora (Zoe Saldaña) and then encounter the High Evolutionary (Chukwudi Iwuji, kind of over-doing it), who is Marvel's equivalent to Josef Mengele.  The special effects are slick - the planet constructed of flesh is something out of a big-budget Cronenbergian nightmare - and the soundtrack is a highlight (it starts with a cleaned-up version of Radiohead's "Creep"), but it sort of exhausts itself well before its conclusion, with sequences like the "No Sleep Till Brooklyn" fight emulating a video game (Metal Gear Rising: Revengeance immediately comes to mind) ... except you don't have a controller.  The pleas for sympathy are a little thickly laid on too, considering it's based on comics where characters can just be resurrected whenever it's convenient.  One would think by now that audiences would be exhausted with these things but with it making close to a billion dollars at the box office, part four is inevitable.  To that I offer two words: joob joob.