The Guardians of the Galaxy Holiday Special (2022)

The Guardians of the Galaxy Holiday Special arrives as the second Marvel Studios Special Presentation, forty-four minutes of Disney+ content in which Mantis and Drax travel to Hollywood to abduct Kevin Bacon as a Christmas gift for a grieving Peter Quill. James Gunn wrote and directed it, and he treats the assignment as a lark: animated flashback interludes in the Rankin/Bass mode, an alien bar band, a talking Soviet dog, a kidnapping resolved by a singalong. The tone is that of a stocking stuffer, and the special knows it.

For those of us who keep ledgers, the inventory is thin. The ensemble is genuinely varied, and Mantis and Drax carry the narrative while Nebula assumes a leadership posture, which registers as modest good faith inherited from a decade of franchise casting. Beyond that, the cupboards are bare. No character's ethnicity is remarked upon. No romance outside the presumed heterosexual norm. No meditation on climate, wealth, bodies, or neurology. The abduction of a Hollywood celebrity is played for slapstick and nothing else, which may be the only subversive choice on offer: a kidnapping treated as a misunderstanding, not a parable about fame or capital.

The result is a Christmas special that wants only to be a Christmas special. It is warm, brief, and entirely uninterested in improving its audience. In an era when even the holiday content arrives with a curriculum attached, that restraint reads as almost quaint. I found it agreeable. I found it harmless. The ledger stays largely empty, and for once, that appears to be the point.