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Disney+ celebrates its now-annual Disney+ Day with the release of Thor: Love and Thunder, the fourth solo outing for Chris Hemsworth’s chiseled hunk of hammer-wielding bro-muscle. It marks two notable reunions: The title dude with writer/director Taika Waititi, who helmed 2017’s pretty damn amusing Thor: Ragnarok. And the title dude with his ex-girlfriend, played by Natalie Portman, who also gets to garb up in thunder-god armor and be superheroic, in a battle against an evildoer played by Christian Bale. A quick inventory of MCU baggage: Love and Thunder is the penultimate film in Marvel’s yeah-sure-what-the-hey-just-throw-it-in-there-(yes-even-Morbius) Phase Four, which will conclude later this year with Wakanda Forever. Surprisingly, this Thor outing wasn’t quite the expected megasmash; it ONLY grossed $755 million worldwide, falling behind its predecessor, Doctor Strange and the Multiverse of Madness – which, in terms of quality, sounds about right.
The Gist: THE DESERT. A weary man (Bale) clutches his young daughter to his breast. The wind has whipped them into husks. He prays. Does anyone hear? In the next scene, he cuddles a burial mound. He eventually crawls off and finds himself at an oasis, splashing into clean, fresh water and wolfing down succulent ripe fruit. I think he’s dead? He’s gotta be dead. Yep, he’s definitely dead, because he meets his god. His god, an arrogant dismisser who sees this long-suffering soul as a creature beneath him. And that’s when the Necrosword finds this man. You know what they say, when the Necrosword finds you, watch out. Suddenly the Necrosword is in his hand so he stabs his god in the throat, then declares himself Gorr the God Butcher. “All gods will die,” he declares, and you can’t help but sit back and think, I gotta see this.
Somewhere else in the universe, Thor hangs out. Last we saw him, in 2019’s Avengers: Endgame, he was depressed with a beer gut, but he worked all that off because he can’t headline his own movies without a six-pack. His good ol’ hammer Mjolnir sits shattered Earthside, in New Asgard, and he’s out with his new inanimate hammer pal, Stormbreaker, having space adventures with the Guardians of the Galaxy. He’s still quite the warrior – he rips through an army of chickenhawk aliens like a sawzall through the Sunday Times – and goo-brained himbo, but he’s also kind of a hippie about things now I think, sort of. He has a braid in his hair and he’s all upbeat but he’s also still capable of violent fighting, and it all is probably masking the pain he feels after the death of his father, mother, brother, buddy and, actually, his entire home planet. You’d probably house a few too many pizzas too.
Speaking of Thor’s pain, he never really got over Jane Foster (Portman). They star in a cutesy flashback rom-com montage, but they grew apart. Well, Jane is in chemo now, and it isn’t working. She feels “drawn” to Mjolnir, which is quite the coincidence, because Thor is heading to New Asgard too. He found out that Gorr is headed there to do bad guy shit like, I dunno, kidnap all the town’s children so he can lure Thor out to space and steal Stormbreaker and use it to open a portal to a realm where he can make a wish and destroy all the gods in the universe in one fell swoop instead of popping in here and there to jam the Necrosword into them. I, too, dream of such efficiency, in a war against the deities, or otherwise.
There’s a big battle in New Asgard. Thor’s fighting some of Gorr’s shadow monsters when a Jane version of Thor shows up, Mjolnir in hand. His ex-girlfriend wields his ex-hammer, and there are many jokes made about the awkwardness. She seems pretty mighty, considering the cancer, which he doesn’t know about. Maybe if they’d stayed on the task and hadn’t paused to begin rekindling their romance, the children of New Asgard wouldn’t have been kidnapped. Just a thought. So they have to go out to space in a fake Viking tourist boat pulled by two screaming alien goats (don’t ask) with old pals Valkyrie (Tessa Thompson), now king of New Asgard, and CG rock guy Korg (voice of Waititi) to rescue the children, the journey demanding a lengthy sidetrack to Omnipotence City so Zeus (Russell Crowe), the god of the gods, can be a total j-hole to our heroes. “Another classic Thor adventure!” is Thor’s proclamatory description of all this, but hey, we’ll be the judge of that.
What Movies Will It Remind You Of?: Congratulations, Marvel. We’re at a point where the only movies MCU movies remind us of are other MCU movies. (Well, maybe Love and Thunder brings to mind the 1981 Clash of the Titans, but only fleetingly.) And so, the Thor movies, ranked:
1. Ragnarok – Pretty good, still middle-tier MCU 2. Thor – Eh, fine, watchable 3. Love and Thunder – Annoying, sloppy 4. The Dark World – Ugh, boring garbage
Performance Worth Watching: Considering this is the MCU’s most deeply silly film, Bale’s performance is terrifying. Gorr watched his daughter die in his arms and now he’s a Voldemort-Gollum-Marilyn Manson hybrid with a Braveheart sword, and leave it to Bale to transcend that description and find the unquenchable agony that drives this character.
Memorable Dialogue: Never thought I’d hear Natalie Portman bellow “Eat my hammer!” but here we are.
Sex and Skin: Thor’s (probably CGI? Or at least a body double?) bare ass.
Our Take: Love and Thunder is a comedy, a tragedy, a cancer drama, a sci-fi epic, a superhero saga, a rom-com and a tribute to Guns ‘n’ Roses. That’s a lot of stuff to cram into one movie, and Waititi does none of it particularly well. He opens with a stark and haunting villain origin, then slams headlong into uptempo action-comedy followed by a somber meditation on mortality followed by more cartoonish action followed by the interminable Omnipotence City sequence, which is so grating and obnoxious and extraneous, it can’t even be saved by Crowe letting ’er rip, and all but begs to be exterminated.
At this point, about half to two-thirds through, I struggled to keep my brain from checking out. The dopey plot, the try-hard jokes (a running gag about Stormbringer “feeling” jealous of Mjolnir flunks the course) and the overall hodgepodgey nature of the film were cheese-grating my nerves to shreds. But I hung on for Waititi’s best sequence, when the heroes confront the bad guy in the Shadow Realm and all the eyeball-searing pinks and golds and teals get shelved for black-and-white cinematography – and a nod to George Melies’ A Trip to the Moon, because what would an MCU movie be without a reference to an early-20th-century silent classic? As visually memorable as the sequence can be, narratively, it’s wet spaghetti flung at the plaster and wacky-wallwalking its way to the floor.
Much can be said for Hemsworth’s underrated comic timing, when he has decent material, and a character who isn’t two or three scintillas away from wearing out his welcome. Bale is awesome, but that’s no surprise; Thompson’s Valkyrie is throwaway screen filler; Portman seems to enjoy cape-and-cowling her way through a movie for a change, but for the most part, she whatevers her way through this just like she did in the other Thors.
It’s odd how simultaneously full-on and half-assed Love and Thunder can be. Waititi rarely lets up on the garish visuals. He forces offbeat comedy into nearly every margin. (Anyone else tired of the self-aware joke’s-on-us bullshit?) He tosses in G’n’R’s biggest jukebox hits in an attempt to beef up frequent and unspectacular displays of CGI-heavy action. That’s some effort for you. But the herky-jerky narrative feels half-considered, and makes us feel like we’re trying to dance to an odd time signature. The idea that the gods are jerks deserving come-uppance is a great one; too bad it’s completely lost in this mess.
Will you stream or skip #Thor Love And Thunder on @DisneyPlus? #SIOSI
Our Call: SKIP IT. This could’ve been a buoyant, welcome diversion from the usual MCU grind. But it’s a disappointing endurance test. OK – now I’m done hammering Thor: Love and Thunder.
John Serba is a freelance writer and film critic based in Grand Rapids, Michigan. Read more of his work at johnserbaatlarge.com.
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