I liked the movie and the backstory, but that hallway fight went on forever (with no consequences to the protagonists!) and I just wanted it to end.
I enjoyed the movie, but... there were a lot of fridge logic moments that didn't make sense, and unlike the first Guardians of the Galaxy which I enjoyed specifically because it didn't run by comic book logic, this one definitely did. Various characters forgot about equipment in order to create drama (Rocket's aero-rigs and Peter's helmet + rocketboots are essential space gear but got ignored TWICE), various characters varied wildly from scene to scene in their physical strength and durability (a character who is fragile in one scene is invulnerable in another), the whole movie relied on Adam Warlock holding the Idiot Ball (why didn't he just take Rocket away instead of smashing him through a wall and then ignoring him to fight Nebula et al.?).
Ultimately I think the movie's greatest and most comic-bookish sin is that it pulled too many punches. Things that should have mattered enormously, that should have carried a lot of emotional weight, didn't. You can't watch Star Wars: A New Hope without realizing that you just watched a movie where billions of people got murdered when their planet blew up. But Guardians 3's tone expects you to forget about billions(?) of people dying because hundreds of animals like those from which the people were made got saved. They expect you to forget about presumably thousands of casualties on Knowhere from the hundreds or thousands of murderbots that attacked it (unless they all miserably failed at their murder mission?), just because Kraglin killed a dozen of the murderbots with the arrow and an assist from the dog.
I enjoyed the movie, but I can't help feeling like its unintended Broken Aesop (
Broken Aesop - TV Tropes) is: Only Some Lives Matter. It doesn't sit well with me.
Also Gamora was inexplicably much more of a murderous murdering murderer than at the start of Guardians 1, even though Peter's acquisition of the orb is the same time period she came from.
This Gamora would have just stabbed Peter in the chest and taken the Orb away from him instead of trying to steal it, and Rocket and Groot would have been left trying to collect bounty on a corpse. The Guardians would never have gone to prison and teamed up.