The majority of the movies on Tubi are, well, nothing I’ve ever heard of. There are a handful of recognizable movies at the top of the various lists, but for the most part, it’s this weird or low budget or even foreign stuff that may or may not be any good but probably isn’t.
That said, I opted to give the 2017 Russian superhero movie Guardians a shot. I’d seen the trailer ages ago, and it at least was going by the Rule of Cool, so it might be fine in a mindless entertainment sort of way.
Guardians opens with some scenes showing how, back in the middle of the Cold War/Space Race, the Soviet Union experimented on some people in an attempt to create superheroes. They were apparently successful, but all the test subject took off in the late 70s and were never seen again. Fast forward to the present and some Russian military men are giving some advanced battle robots a test run when the machines suddenly turn on and kill all the military personnel. It seems a bald, barechested bad guy with electrical powers and the ability to control machines has taken over not only the robots, but also all the other military vehicles on the base in order to go about the standard take-over-the-world sort of plot of some kind.
In order to stop this fellow, the Russian military group “Patriot” brings in a new woman Major and tasks her with the villain’s defeat. To do that, she’ll need to find a team of Guardians to take him on, and to that end, she quickly recruits four: a man with power over rock and stone, a speedster ninja guy, a werebear, and an amnesiac woman with some kind of water powers.
Truth be told, many of the superpowers here are vaguely defined, and this movie works through the plot very quickly. Running at a brisk 89 minutes, by the time the first half hour mark has come along, the team has been gathered, had their first battle against the villain and his clone army, and most of them were captured and given the standard “we should all be working together” bad guy speech from so many other movies of this genre.
So, how was the movie? Well, it’s mostly a mass of cliches that, true, does operate under the Rule of Cool. Rock-Man does form stone armor, the speedster carries giant swords that he uses to cut men and cars in half, and the bear-man carries a large machine gun in the movie’s third act. The effects are decent, maybe a bit above a CW superhero TV show’s, and the plot is, well, something that wasn’t anything I hadn’t seen before. The biggest difference may be the military attache, the aforementioned Major, shows sympathy for the plight of the Guardians as opposed to, say, being a hardass who just wants them to do their duty. Each Guardian has a speech explaining his or her biggest problem, but there isn’t much here I haven’t seen before.
That said, a bear-man with a machine gun at least gets coolness points.
Guardians was apparently a box office flop in Russia with a lot of bad reviews, so the mid-credit sequel hook probably won’t be going anywhere. Guardians was not a good movie, but it’s also not one I regret watching, and at least it had some cool visuals. In the meantime, I’d say the MCU has nothing to worry about.
Grade: C
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