Not to be left out in the gold rush of Superhero film franchises Russian entered the fray with 2017s Guardians, an answer to Marvel’s The Avengersthough with even less set-up than DC’s Justice League.

In the film’s backstory, during the Cold War, for you youngsters out there a period from 1947 through 1989 when the world’s superpowers the USA and USSR stood ready with nuclear annihilation in their bitter rivalry, the USSR experimented on people, creating the Guardians, super-powered individuals. After the Soviet’s collapse these people dispersed to the four winds, losing themselves in the vast terrain of the Russian Federation. Simultaneously a competing Cold War project to protect the motherland, which focused on mechanical powers created by the mad scientist August Kuratov, succeed in giving Kuratov the ability to control any machine. Now Kuratov is back and bent on world domination. With the military’s vast forces neutralized by his ability to usurp control of all their weapon systems it is up to Major Elena Larina to locate and reunite the Guardians in the hopes that thy can defeat Kuratov.

As a set up that doesn’t exactly suck, but the movie Guardians,  suffers from both a lack and over abundance of character issues to create a compelling plot. The film seems to have no central character to act as a point of view and with a brief running time of a mere 88 minutes it simply can’t explore all the set-ups that it attempts to utilize. There’s the question, where have the Guardians gone? Well, that’s knocked out in a fast montage of computer searches and rapid-fire location changes as Major Larina seeks and recruits the four members. Instead of any tension the sequence becomes route exposition and introduction. Each of the Guardians presented in the film have deep character issues, but without the focus on any particular character all of the issues are given short shrift and thus come as flat and uninteresting.

The movie picks up in the third act with a climatic battle against a villain atop a tower in a metropolitan center surrounded by a force-field with the Guardians having to learn to fight and work together to save the world from domination.

Overall this was slightly less than passable with much missed promise.