Thor: Love and Thunder (2022)

There’s a point in Thor: Love and Thunder when Russell Crowe’s Zeus bemoans his circumstances, lamenting, “When did we become jokes?” I’m fairly certain that director and co-writer Taika Waititi didn’t intend for this line to be prescient – Zeus is meant to be both antagonist and figure of ridicule, to say nothing of Crowe’s outlandish attempt at a “Greek” accent – but it ends up being my chief complaint about Love and Thunder and about the current trend of insincere superhero movies writ large. Love and Thunder is all too disingenuous, at once lampooning the superhero genre while simultaneously begging us to accept its more outlandish trappings.

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 Indeed, if the upcoming Disney+ series Secret Invasion is to reveal that some familiar faces have been replaced by shape-shifting Skrulls, I vote we consign this Thor to history and get back to something a little more earnest.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.

Monday at the Movies - November 13, 2017

Welcome to another installment of “Monday at the Movies.” Last week saw the debut of Taika Waititi on this blog, so today we flash back a few years for his vampire mockumentary.

What We Do in the Shadows (2014) – It’s no surprise that this film, written and directed by Jemaine Clement and Taika Waititi, is a laugh-out-loud riot; one need only look at their recent comedic pedigrees (Flight of the Conchords and Thor: Ragnarok) to know we’re in for a good time. Waititi, Clement, and Jonathan Brugh star as a trio of vampiric flatmates in New Zealand, the subject of a documentary in the months leading up to their annual Unholy Masquerade ball, during which time they make human friends and consider adding one more to their nocturnal number. The bulk of the film’s humor comes from the vampires’ rapid-fire delivery and gift with one-liners (describing a bloodstained couch as “Well, it’s red now”) and the distinctly unique blend of supernatural horror with the utterly banal, like seeing a vampire do the dishes or learn how to use Skype. There’s a divine subplot involving Rhys Darby as the leader of a gang of well-mannered werewolves (“We’re werewolves, not swear-wolves”) and the delightful presence of a fourth roommate, an 8,000-year-old dead ringer for Nosferatu’s Count Orlok. The film’s comedic timing is impeccable, perfecting the art of the mockumentary with the awkward way its characters continually break the fourth-wall with a self-aware smile, but there are also those moments that engross you so much that you forget about the mockumentary conceit – until a character hilariously mentions the fact that there are cameras in the room. At a tight eighty-five minutes, What We Do ends up doing the opposite of overstaying their welcome; I’d have been happy with much, much more of this irreverent and singularly inimitable vision of the vampire myth wedded to the quotidian.

That does it for this week’s edition of “Monday at the Movies.” We’ll see you next week!

Thor: Ragnarok (2017)

A staggering seventeen films into the Marvel Cinematic Universe, audiences are still prompted to ask, “Is this the best Marvel movie yet?” It’s a question that reminds me that I haven’t updated my Marvel ranking since doing a Top 10 since 2014, but it’s amazing that we’re still given occasion to ask that question, that we haven’t tired of the Marvel method just yet because the films keep finding new angles on these classic characters. Thor: Ragnarok continues the Marvel tradition of pushing its characters out of their comfort zones, both narratively and tonally, with a film that exudes so much style and fun without losing sight of emotional substance.

After recovering a dangerous artifact during his quest for the Infinity Stones, Thor (Chris Hemsworth) returns home to Asgard to find that his father Odin (Anthony Hopkins) has been supplanted by Loki (Tom Hiddleston). In claiming the throne for himself, however, Loki has upset the delicate balance of the Nine Realms, exposing Asgard to threats like Hela, goddess of death (Cate Blanchett). Cleaning up his brother’s mistakes will take Thor to the gladiatorial arena of The Grandmaster (Jeff Goldblum) in combat with an old friend, the Hulk (Mark Ruffalo).

I’m not going to make proclamations about whether or not this is the best Marvel movie or even whether it’s the best Thor movie (I’m still quite attached to the stodgy Shakespearian Thor from Kenneth Branagh), because the premise of the question overlooks the bounty of riches we have gotten from Marvel over the last decade. After all, I’m old enough to remember when a single Batman movie was a treat years in the making; in 2017 alone we’ve seen four Marvel movies, three DC movies, scads of animated direct-to-videos, and more superhero television than a human can watch. What I will say, however, is that Thor: Ragnarok is more crowd-pleasingly fun than I can recall having at a Thor movie, but strikingly it’s funny in a way that isn’t overpowering; unlike in Guardians, Vol. 2, where I felt worn down by the deflating humor, Ragnarok knows which moments to punctuate with a gag and which to let linger (a somber sequence on a cliffside, for one). It is the funniest of the Thor films, with Chris Hemsworth displaying a potent comedic sensibility; the film is virtually stolen by Goldblum’s hedonistic Grandmaster, all finger lilts and self-congratulation, though even Anthony Hopkins gets in a good laugh as Loki-Odin (his reaction to Thor’s arrival, subtle and perfect, might be a new favorite Odin moment).

While the Thor movies have always felt a little bit perfunctory, neither advancing the overarching narrative nor developing an arc for Thor beyond being an action hero, Thor: Ragnarok does attempt to tie the previous two films together into an impromptu arc for the god of thunder, collecting little bits from the previous Thor and Avengers films and uniting them into a story about warring brothers, imposing fathers, and those who cannot help but lead. It’s a real treat to hear composer Mark Mothersbaugh take the same approach to the film’s score, weaving in bits from Patrick Doyle and Brian Tyler before him (as well as a conspicuous harpsichord, to match a small cameo). Ragnarok does, then, finally tie Thor into the larger Marvel world and his own narrative arc, which both provides a satisfying rush to those of us who’ve been here from the beginning and lends a sense of cosmic importance to the film’s proceedings.

There’s much in Thor: Ragnarok I would have liked to see more, which is usually the mark of a good film, that it leaves you wanting more. Tessa Thompson’s Valkyrie, a kind of mirror-universe Lady Sif, is a fine answer to Thor, a hard-drinking survivalist who’d fit just as well on the deck of the Millennium Falcon. Hela and Skurge (Karl Urban) are compelling villains, particularly in light of Marvel’s notorious difficulty at crafting distinctive antagonists (though that does seem to be changing of late); the film does an astonishingly deft job at quickly characterizing them. I predict Korg (voiced by Taika Waititi) will become a Groot-level fan favorite, and the great thing about a shared universe like this is that we’ll surely see him crop up again soon. Then there’s the small cameos that could easily flesh out a film all their own, to say nothing of the surprising buddy chemistry between Thor and Hulk, which seems surprisingly obvious in hindsight; one wishes, though, that Bruce Banner had gotten as much screen time, because Ruffalo is really quite adept at Banner’s quick subvocal quips and perpetual disorientation.

Thor: Ragnarok might be the best Thor movie yet (and Waititi’s hints that he might be down for a Thor 4 are great news indeed), but its balance of bust-out humor and emotional weight stand as an example for Marvel going forward. Its score, too, distinctive in a way Marvel hasn’t approached since the “Awesome Mix” of Guardians of the Galaxy, reminds us how cinematically potent these adventures can be when they’re crafted carefully and thoughtfully. The film does a very good job breaking its characters down, taking them places they aren’t fully at home – Banner in space, Thor sans his hammer – to see what the characters really are. This one is worthy, and I’m quite excited to see it again.

Thor: Ragnarok is rated “PG-13 for intense sequences of sci-fi violence and action, and brief suggestive material.” Directed by Taika Waititi. Written by Eric Pearson, Craig Kyle, and Christopher L. Yost. Starring Chris Hemsworth, Tom Hiddleston, Cate Blanchett, Tessa Thompson, Jeff Goldblum, Mark Ruffalo, and Anthony Hopkins.