10. James Gunn’s PG Porn (2008)
Everything you need to know about James Gunn’s PG Porn, the web series that Gunn and his brothers Brian and Sean made for the laddie website Spike.com, can be found in the title. Each of the eleven episodes plays like a pornagraphic film, except they’re rated PG, which means that they lack all nudity or sexual content. So while the episodes feature scenarios you’d find in a porn film, they take shocking turns away from the endings you’d expect.
Case in point, the episode “Genital Hospital” begins with Sean Gunn receiving a testicular exam from the seductive Dr. Poonwater (real adult actress Belladonna). As expected, the doctor begins talking about the big thing in his pants. But instead of this observation leading to raunchy fun, the doctor instead explains that the big thing in the man’s pants is a cancerous tumor and he has six months to live. As that example demonstrates, the PG Porn shorts find Gunn still embracing the edgy humor of his Troma days, but he executes the jokes with greater precision—a feat helped by the fact that he’s working with top-level actors, including Nathan Fillion, Craig Robinson, and Alan Tudyk.
9. Super (2010)
Superheroes have always been close to James Gunn’s heart. Even before he stepped behind the director’s chair, Gunn had written The Specials, a (not very good) vérité-style movie about a team of C-listers. So it comes as no surprise that he would make superheroes the subject of his second movie, 2010’s Super. Rainn Wilson plays Frank Darbo, an utter loser who hits rock bottom after his wife (Liv Tyler) leaves him for smarmy criminal Jacques (Kevin Bacon). After seeing a vision of the Christian superhero the Holy Avenger (Fillion), Frank decides to become a superhero himself, donning red pajamas and beating people with a wrench as the Crimson Bolt.
As that summary indicates, Super touches on most of Gunn’s favorite themes. We’ve got a loser who finds meaning through his costume and mission, and plenty of wry observations about the genre. However, there’s a meanness to Super that, unlike Gunn’s other projects, doesn’t get balanced out by any softness. Frank is pathetic and cruel when he pummels people with his wrench, and the addition of psychotic teen sidekick Boltie (Elliot Page) only ups the nastiness. Not a terrible movie by any stretch, Super finds Gunn exorcising some of the brattiness he needed to shed before becoming an auteur of superhero movies.
8. Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3 (2023)
One of the most impressive things about Gunn’s career is how he went from working on lean indies with tiny budgets to managing huge spectacles, full of big ideas but never losing sight of the characters. In fact, Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3 is the only time that one feels Gunn getting overwhelmed by the enormity of the project, resulting in a film that’s excellent in many ways, but still often overstuffed and unwieldy. That may be a result of a production cycle extended by Gunn’s brief firing and the making of The Suicide Squad, but whatever the reason, Guardians 3 lags behind its two predecessors.
And yet, Guardians 3 is still pretty great. Only Gunn has got a genuinely emotional performance out of Chris Pratt, who is never better as a Peter Quill turned self-destructive after losing Gamora (Zoe Saldaña) in Avengers: Infinity War. Even more powerful is Bradley Cooper‘s vocal performance as Rocket Raccoon, who gets tortured alongside his animal friends by the movie’s villain, the High Evolutionary (a delightfully imperious Chukwudi Iwuji). Despite the upsetting animal abuse themes and disparaging states of the characters, Gunn still manages to find notes of humor and grace, including the MCU’s first F-bomb, saving Guardians 3 from getting completely weighed down.
