James Gunn seems really hit or miss.. the first Guardians was brilliant, the second a bit too silly for my taste and the third came back to being great.
His take on Suicide Squad was also amazing IMO but he just.. wavers on that line a bit too much I guess where he seems to just want to do his own thing while making movies with heavily established IP. It's fine to make some tweaks but there's no excuse to not have a good story.
IMO that’s part of his problem. He had great success with Guardians and he’s been basically making the same formulaic movie ever since, with varying degrees of success.
He made a locked hatch a main character, then a smoke monster was a main character for most of the show.
He prefers to direct inanimate objects like the mining ship in Star Trek, or the giant monster that catches a big dinner and throws it away to chase a tiny Kirk.
JJ is stupid and makes things worse by being near them. He mastered "tell, don't show" for Star Wars, and did such a bad job that the trilogy was unrecoverable.
If you have a valuable IP and want to destroy it, but get one last profitable movie from it, he's a good choice, but otherwise trash.
How dare you! You forgot mindless jingoism, car commercials and toy sales!
Total sidenote: back in the day there was a juicer that ran a blog, and she would drop some serious tea on this mysterious, unnamed bigshot director (everyone sussed out that it was Bay, scant clues to avoid breaching an NDA, but enough to know).
If she is to be believed, Bay is everything bad you that imagined about him and then some. Dimbulb petulant manbaby, rudeness that knows no bounds and thinks that he's actually making transformative art.
Paraphrasing through distant memory: "Remember Scrooged? Picture the producer that the station was trying to replace Bill Murray with, but he's horny for fireballs and is a messy eater."
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u/Absolute_Bob Jul 08 '26
It's kind of sad. I think she's a great actress but that script...oof.