Respectfully, I don't agree with most of this.
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 thought it was cool and really well done, but this part I understand. If you're not into it, it went long.
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.
I don't get what you mean here. What's "comic book logic"?
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.?).
It seems pretty consistent to me that some things are powerful enough to harm them and others are not. Nathan Fillion's gun hurts Drax, for example, but Drax can take a LOT of punishment from getting knocked about.
Adam Warlock IS an idiot as portrayed here. Why would you expect him to make the best decisions? Maybe he just felt like fighting.
Ultimately I think the movie's greatest and most comic-bookish sin
I don't like how you're using that as an insult. Thinking that comics are all one thing is like thinking that all movies are sports movies or all TV shows are crime procedurals.
is that it pulled too many punches. Things that should have mattered enormously, that should have carried a lot of emotional weight, didn't.
Hmm. I think a lot of people who watched that movie felt that it caried a lot of emotional weight.
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 mean, they didn't spend a lot of time on it, but the characters certainly reacted to what happened. They didn't really have time within the confines of the movie to spend time being sad about it, but I think the movie made quite a lot of effort to point out how horrible the actions of the bad guy were. More than the usual amount, certainly more than Star Wars, where Leia is NEVER seen being upset about her homeworld's destruction and doesn't even have a single line of dialogue regarding it after it happens, IIRC.
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.
On the one hand, you're complaining that it was too comic-bookish, but on the other hand, you're complaining that the morality isn't black-and-white. All the characters are deeply flawed. That's part of the point.
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.
She'd gone through a few years of different experiences by the start of this film. She may have been open to positive change at the point in her life where GotG1 started, but by now has been hanging out with the Ravagers doing Ravagey things. (Though they seem to be a pretty loveable group themselves). Clearly there's something about the Guardians (and Quill himself) that speaks to her in a way that brings out the best in her.
At any rate, you're absolutely free to not like it, of course. I just feel like a lot of your nitpicks remind me of reviews where the author says "(this part) doesn't make an sense!" when the explanation is explicitly called out in the film. It's one thing when a movie contradicts itself or seems like the makers gave NO THOUGHT to the consequences of the actions shown on screen (Wonder Woman raping a guy comes to mind - NO ONE noticed that while making the film?) but this movie (to me, anyhow) seemed to, if anything, go out of its way to make sure that everything was consistent and called out by the characters. YMMV.