The Guardians (2017)

Super villain August Kuratov is back from… somewhere… and he plans to take over the world. He was part of a cold war-era genetic experiment to make supermen. To stop him Maj. Elena Larina (Valeriya Shkirando) pulls together the other survivors of that project: rock-controller Ler (Sebastien Sisak), speedster ninja Khan (Sanzhar Madiyev), were-bear Ursus (Anton Pampushnyy), and invisible girl Xenia (Alina Lanina). These Guardians do not age, which has left them all depressed, except for Xenia, whose depressed because she’s lost her memories. They’ll have to over come treachery and find their secret group power if they are going to save Moscow.

A little under a year ago the trailer for The Guardians hit the web and geekdom went nuts. It was cool beyond any superhero film and it was in Russian. There was an upright bear with a gatling gun. How cool is that? And the ninja moved like Nightcrawler from X-Men 2, but also had over-sized curved blades that cut through cars. The girl was exceptionally sexy, squirming on a table while blue lights embedded in her skin flickered. The FX looked great and the Soviet-style imagery gave it a unique quality.

OK, it had good trailers, but the film was never going to live up to them, a fact that became clearer when it came out that the entire budget was $5 million. So is it any good at all? Not really.

First, I do have to give it its due. For that cheap a price tag, it looks fantastic. The FX aren’t up to US blockbuster levels, but the slightly less polished work actually look cooler (“cool” is an important word when talking about The Guardians). Walking robots, a fleet of helicopters carrying a giant antenna, force fields, and a devastated Moscow are far more interesting than the CGI that’s on display in most Western action movies costing 15 times more. The cinematography is imaginative and there are some amazing shots.

But that’s all you have. The script and editing are a mess. I’m going to be generous with the dialog as the subtitles were very poor, but there’s no getting around how very little that dialog accomplishes. Every character dials the emotion up to eleven, but nothing is earned. Elena has two minutes of interaction with the guardians before one starts talking of his great tragedy. Another barely speaks for an hour, but when he does, it is to suddenly related his own great tragedy. Fifteen minutes later they all announce they are best friends and Elena talks about how she’s learned the meaning of friendship from them. When? Sometime off screen I guess. There’s a betrayal that’s supposed to mean something, but doesn’t. There’s a death that is supposed to raise the stakes, but we don’t know the guy who died. These aren’t characters, just actors who occasionally over-emoted toward the camera. It’s as if a half hour of character interaction is laying on the editing room floor. Maybe they did run out of money so never shot the scenes where the heroes got to know each other, laughed, joked, and formed connections, though I suspect they were never written.

With the solid FX work the action should be good, but it isn’t. I’m sure budget was a factor, but it is still more of a script problem. We’ve got an invisible girl and a speedster so there’s all kinds of cool tricks that could come into play. But no, our heroes just walk straight forward and exchange a few punches with the big bad. It makes the Guardians appear weak and stupid, but far more troubling, it’s boring.

There’s a lot of silliness stuffed into the pictures (like their super-suits coming out of nowhere), but those many issues can be excused in a picture like this if it is exciting and gives us someone to care about. But it isn’t and it doesn’t.

My Two Reel rating is a little high, but it is interesting to see a Russian superhero film, and the FX is way beyond what I would expect, so I won’t say to avoid it.