Guardians (2017)

**The Guardians: how to make a "Russian X-Men" flick for $7 million.** In our world the sum of $7 million was last adequate for a blockbuster about 40 years ago. Obviously, the Russian team bet on using smaller resources to maximum gain. Not unlike the current Russian president's geopolitics, cough. The result is more than solid—for a direct-to-DVD level superhero flick, that is. **The women:** gorgeous in a way which only Eastern European women can ever be—combining the Scandinavian Valkyrie component with the finer feminine Slavic beauty. In short—the next Trump-type can do worse than dip into the beauty pool of The Guardians. **The men**: dreamy types, blond and dark, muscular and lithe—for all tastes. **The acting quality:** imagine the supporting cast of any generic direct-to-DVD film with Steven Segal, but worse by about 25%. **The action sequences:** world class. **The special effects:** more or less on par with the special effects from the first X-Men film from the year 2000, which back then cost $75 million to make. Apparently a decade and a half later technology has progressed enough to enable the plucky Russian team to achieve the same effects of…the effects…for a minuscule fraction of the cost. **The plot:** Soviet super-soldier experiments decades ago led to a bunch of amnesiac, un-aging men and women scattered around the country, who are gathered once more in order to stop the baddie who is wreaking havoc on New York, *sorry*, I meant Moscow. The baddie in question is like an uglier Bane, but with an approximation of the powers of Magneto. **The end result:** can it compete with the Marvel or DC films of today? Absolutely not. Is it good entertainment when measured by direct-to-DVD or TV film (or modern computer game) standards? Sure **Conclusion:** back in the 1960’s and 1970’s Italian directors like Sergio Leone and Dario Argento proved that even if you have no budget and no actors and no coherent plot, you can still create world-class, even legendary cinema through sheer class. The Guardians has no class whatsoever, but is a perfectly OK derivative adventure with superheroes and things going bang, and in an "exotic" setting at that. Maybe this is just the start of something cheap and beautiful? If Russia becomes a world center for cheap knock-offs of Hollywood films, I for one would be happy with this development and would watch these films, because with smaller budgets and therefore less oversight by focus-group obsessed bean counters, interesting stuff may start to develop within the generic story skeletons, as once was the case with Italian films.