Oh my where to begin?

About an hour into watching the Blu-ray release I decided to critique what I'd seen and add to the list as I continued to watch the remaining hour and fifteen minutes. I went over the IMDb character limit and had to delete a lot of it. Never a good sign. Here's what remains after editing!

* The intro where the Guardians are fighting a giant space slug monster could have had a lot more depth to it, but instead it's the backdrop to Baby Groot (who can't be any help) dancing around to Mr Blue Sky by ELO. Merchandising for Baby Groot toys, that's why it's there.

* The people they're working for on this job are gold Egyptian statues, living in the discarded sets from the old Flash Gordon movie. Quill says "hey, don't offend these people" or words to that effect and then does, followed by Rocket stealing things they were hired to protect. Then him and Quill have a pointless argument in a magic asteroid field, which destroys their ship. Pointless conflict.

* Talking about destroying the Milano, it's reminiscent of a scene from Star Trek: Generations, where the saucer section from the Enterprise D crash lands on a forest planet. Here, Drax is trailing behind the ship on a cable getting bashed around on the trees unrealistically like some sort of video game character. I know these movies are about fantasy storytelling but this is just ridiculous.

* Nice to see Sly Stallone in this movie, I thought. Until he mumbled and stumbled his way through the main scene he was in. Using star power to shill a crap film? Check.

* Kurt Russell is an actor I like. He's an action star but able to do decent dramatic scenes too, got a bit of range. However here he's given some sort of deranged Christlike figure to play, who walks around on his acid flashback planet opening his arms wide, doing animated Powerpoint presentations using white egg pod things designed by Apple. This seems to keep most of the main cast distracted while Rocket and Groot are captured and there's some mutiny subplot involving Yondu resulting in them all being kept against their will.

* There's so much weak comedy shoehorned into this. The comedy in the original film had better pacing and built up to the moments nearly perfectly throughout. Case in point, the long drawn-out and not at all amusing scene where Rocket and Yondu are imprisoned and Groot has to try and find a replacement for the red arrow-controlling Mohawk on Yondu's head. This is so he can arrow through all the story problems - I mean prison bars and mutineers, sorry. He brings back item after item that isn't right and it's just tedious. In the first movie the arrow tricks were amazing because the story built up to using it just once, and then the scene where he did was so quick and well-executed it had a huge impact. Here it just doesn't.

* It's too heavy on the CGI and slow motion shots. It feels mercilessly overdone, like it's trying to distract us all from the massive story problems. Yondu/Rocket/Groot going through the jump points with giant wacky eyes or Gamorrah attacking Nebula with a ginormous Gatling gun that even Drax would struggle to carry, that's five times the size of her, Quill and Ego playing "space catch" with a ball made of energy for that family values in space moment - just three examples.

* Ego's plan is both baffling and disgusting. Basically he's some kind of immortal man-whore who's been spreading his seed across the galaxy, who comes back to enlist his children to help him turn all the planets into copies of his acid trip one. He does this by draining their life force, going back to their home planet via some weird glowing plant thing he's put there when he visited to knock up some poor unsuspecting girl, then using some weird blue energy mass that then consumes that particular planet. Using - I kid you not - a cheesy special effect reminiscent of that awful David Duchovny movie Evolution, or Galactus in Fantastic Four: Rise Of The Silver Surfer. It's just horrible. Such a whiplash tone shift from what they were doing before as well, not that that was any good either. If I was a kid that would give me nightmares.

Overall this reminds me of the Star Wars prequels, by which I mean Episodes I-III. The cartoon set pieces, the endless overdone action scenes, flat characters, poor dialogue, story holes. Worst of all the jumping from planet to planet to ship to planet so quickly that it becomes hard to follow what's going on. It genuinely feels like this movie was written and directed by late 90s George Lucas, more concerned with cramming in merchandising opportunities than making a great movie. All those great character moments between the main cast have vanished here, they're all off doing random errands until they're obligated to meet up later to stop Admiral Nutcase aka Ego and be the heroes again.

I started grading this movie as a 4 after watching the first hour. Now I've watched all of it I can't give it more of a score than 1 because it's just dire. I got up to take a whiz at the one hour forty minute mark and actually turned to my girlfriend and said "Oh my god there's still over half an hour of this travesty left". Even the Stan Lee cameo was a roll eyes moment, they couldn't even get that right!

Avoid. I cannot stress this enough. One of the worst movies I've seen in years.

Best bit? Cheap Trick playing over the credits. Ruined by so many random extra scenes just end the movie already!