James Gunn, Edgelord

Regular readers of this blog will not be surprised to hear that I am no fan of '90s independent film, with its many unattractive traits including its smug, lazy, show-offy--dare I say it, EXTREME!--edginess (exemplified by that "filmmaker" whose critical adulation has lasted long enough for him to become the "Grand Old Man" of the movement, Quentin Tarantino).

Director and now DC Films boss James Gunn may be said to have come out of not only that period, but that ferment, with his work marked by it from Tromeo and Juliet forward. Thus writing the story and screenplay for 2002's live-action Scooby-Doo film he initially produced an R-rated script, which, in spite of the cuts and other changes, in its final PG-rated form still not only made Scrappy-Doo the villain (again, not just edgy, but lazy), but gave him an R-rated vocabulary (even if his usage of it is strategically cut off in the film we get) and had him literally piss all over Daphne while they are riding the Mystery Machine in a flashback scene (which, given that she was being played by Sarah Michelle Gellar in her Buffy the Vampire Slayer era, also meant his appearing to piss all over a feminist icon in her heyday).

All of this carried over to his superhero films, which actually began with the low-budget Super (which Gunn didn't have to keep PG, and didn't), but also the PG-13 Guardians of the Galaxy films, where he wore a cheap nihilism on his sleeve throughout, from running his gag in which characters get cut off in the middle of a dramatic monologue into the ground, to having Yondu massacre his mutinous crewmen to the sounds of "Come a Little Bit Closer," before getting himself fired from the job of directing the third and last installment for some, again, edgelord, jokes on Twitter that came back to haunt him (before he was rehired and did his thing all over again).

If I generally find Gunn's sensibility wearisome, especially as this side of '90s culture grows ever more stale and trite, it at least seemed passable with the Guardians franchise (at least, to this viewer who never read any of the relevant comics)--but less so with the DC Extended Universe, and still more its most celebrated characters, such that barring his managing to show another side to himself as an artiste (something his cohort is not known for), it seems to me to bode poorly for their latest crack at satisfying their Marvel envy. Or, rather, their envy of what Marvel used to be in the Beforetime preceding the pandemic.