After defeating Thanos, Thor (Chris Hemsworth) has been traveling with the Guardians of the Galaxy (gang’s all here), blundering his way through heroic deeds until he learns that Gorr the God-Butcher (Christian Bale) has been slaughtering deities with his fearsome Necrosword. Thor sets off to defeat Gorr with Valkyrie (Tessa Thompson) by his side and, most improbably, his old love Jane Foster (Natalie Portman), who now wields the hammer Mjolnir as The Mighty Thor.
I rewatched Thor: Ragnarok the night before seeing Love and Thunder, even though the latter isn’t a direct sequel, and my estimation of Ragnarok had dropped in the intervening five years. Overly arch and ironic, Ragnarok is still entertaining enough, but it could do with about 25% less whimsy to be really successful. I’m not saying that superhero movies shouldn’t be fun, but the fun shouldn’t be at the expense of the characters, deflating tension or emotional weight with a self-referential one-liner. But Ragnarok made more than $850 million, and so the shackles are off; Waititi does his thing all over Love and Thunder, and now it’s about 65% too silly to be any good.
Color me old-fashioned, but I still prefer the straight-faced Shakespearean Thor (blond eyebrows notwithstanding). I’ve never been a big fan of the “himbo Thor” bequeathed to us by Waititi, and I still don’t buy that the character has changed personality so much just because he hangs out with wiseacres like Tony Stark. Indeed, if the upcoming Disney+ series Secret Invasion is to reveal that some familiar faces have been replaced by shape-shifting Skrulls, I vote we consign this Thor to history and get back to something a little more earnest. At least Chris Hemsworth seems to be having fun, even though he’s the butt of most of the jokes (and at one point, quite literally so). Though Thor is now, by default, the ersatz elder statesman of the Marvel Cinematic Universe, he’s treated like an abject buffoon, whose every scene might as well be subtitled, “Aren’t I an idiot?”
And yet Love and Thunder asks us to invest in the emotional depths of this demigod-child, presenting his long romantic history with Jane in the style of a montage that points a derisive finger at how silly it is to have feelings. “Muscle boy sad!” the film cries with all the grace of a schoolyard bully, yet then it tries to pivot into an unearned third act in which we’re suddenly asked to embrace the tragic pathos of Thor’s broken emotional core. Waititi wants to spoof his cake and eat it too, something that barely worked in Ragnarok before punting that subplot to the Russo Brothers in Avengers: Infinity War. If Thor has an arc in this film, I defy anyone to tell me what it is, because there’s a particular choice he makes at the end of the film that seems to come out of nowhere, teeing up a very bizarre status quo for the Asgardian corner of the MCU.
It might seem blasphemous to say, but there’s probably a much better version of this film that includes Hemsworth’s Thor not at all. Christian Bale is earning well-deserved accolades as one of the MCU’s better villains, with a solid backstory and bang-up visual design; one wishes, however, that his Gorr were a bit more ‘show’ and less ‘tell,’ since he doesn’t butcher all that many gods over the course of the film. Meanwhile, Natalie Portman is back after a brief hiatus, and her turn as Jane finally gets her in on the super-action. Her iteration of Thor positively sings, and the sequences reintroducing her are suitably effective, giving us the sense that Waititi can make a proper superhero film if he restrained himself. In fact, it’s a short putt to imagine a better Love and Thunder that only includes these two: Gorr the God-Butcher hunting the newly-minted Mighty Thor while Jane Foster reckons with what it means to be a god. (Keep the original Thor with the Guardians of the Galaxy, and let James Gunn deal with him.)
But instead of forging new territory in the heretofore directionless Phase Four of the MCU, Waititi is busy replaying his own greatest hits, dialing the idiocy up to eleven. There’s a reprise of the “Norse pageant” from Ragnarok, even though the joke doesn’t ring the same without a Loki to direct the reenactment; Korg turns up again and again, now lacking the novelty of a rock man with Waititi’s dulcet tones; and poor Tessa Thompson, such a bright light in Ragnarok, is relegated to a thankless turn as Asgard’s king until the movie nigh forgets about her. (Sign her up for a Disney+ series, please!)
I wouldn’t go quite as far as Mark Kermode, who said of the fourth Thor film that it was “genuinely, properly terrible,” but let’s be honest: Marvel’s Phase Four hasn’t exactly shined with the brightness of its predecessors, and Love and Thunder continues a strain of adequate-to-mediocre outings that suggest Marvel may have lost the plot in trying to serve fans and fan-favorites alike. Perhaps a better title would have been Thor: Sound and Fury, because it’s told by (and stars) a band of idiots, ultimately signifying nothing beyond a director’s postmodern self-indulgence. Forgive me, but I think superhero stories ought to be a little bit more than a vanity project that overstays its welcome.
Thor: Love and Thunder is rated PG-13 for “intense sequences of sci-fi violence and action, language, some suggestive material, and partial nudity.” Directed by Taika Waititi. Written by Taika Waititi and Jennifer Kaytin Robinson. Based on the Marvel Comics. Starring Chris Hemsworth, Christian Bale, Tessa Thompson, Taika Waititi, Russell Crowe, and Natalie Portman.
