Movies…with a little bit of obscure culture and sports mixed in
Thor: Love And Thunder (2022) is Thor: Ragnarok (2017) cranked up to eleven. The director and cast are back with another adventure tinged with plenty of attempted comedy. Love And Thunder tries to amplify everything by bringing romance into the picture. Whether all the various bits, skits or decisions made work for you, well that’s what is up for subjective debate.
“Thor enlists the help of Valkyrie, Korg and ex-girlfriend Jane Foster to fight Gorr the God Butcher, who intends to make the gods extinct.”
Director: Taika Waititi
Writer: Taika Waititi, Jennifer Kaytin Robinson, Stan Lee
Starring: Chris Hemsworth, Natalie Portman, Christian Bale, Tessa Thompson, Taika Waititi, Russell Crowe
Release Date: July 8, 2022
IMDB
We are back on the Marvel train. We are going to see this through. For better or for worse.
Thor: Love And Thunder (2022) is Thor: Ragnarok (2017) cranked up to eleven. The director and cast are back with another adventure tinged with plenty of attempted comedy. Love And Thunder tries to amplify everything by bringing romance into the picture. Whether all the various bits, skits or decisions made work for you, well that’s what is up for subjective debate.
Thor (Chris Hemsworth) is trying to enjoy his life of fame and retirement when his heroic nature must be harnessed once again to fight a galactic god-killing badass known as Gorr the God Butcher (Christian Bale). Thor must protect New Asgard, and in order to do that he must enlist King Valkyrie (Tessa Thompson) and Kork (Taika Waititi).
The trio get an unexpected reinforcement when Jane Foster (Natalie Portman) arrives wielding Thor’s magical hammer Mjolnir. Jane has become a superhero God-like figure because she is dying in the real world and the only thing keeping her alive is the hammer itself, and the thrill of adventure.
Love And Thunder takes a hard turn into the romantic comedy genre, leaning heavily into Thor and his relationship with Jane, and his old hammer. Naturally, like many a normal man, Thor tries to cover up real feelings with cheap laughs and over-the-top charisma. But the true reality is that the God of Thunder is not only facing a god killer, but also fact he can’t always get what he wants.
Turns out, the audience can’t really get what it wants either because Thor: Love And Thunder is nowhere near as good as Thor: Ragnarok. Taiki Waititi, in his second go-around with the hero, amps up everything to eleven and blows out the speakers. The story, comedy, characters are all louder, but brashness is not always the best policy.
Let’s start with a grand picture thought of Thor: Love And Thunder. This movie is emblematic of a problem with the Marvel Universe. The story focuses on quantity instead of quality. There is an attempt to grab at nostalgia from past success with the imitation of this movie’s predecessor. The characters are simplified and turned into SNL skit monsters rather than fully thought out processes.
Everything about Love And Thunder seems like it’s stitched together with loose thread; it’s as if the movie was put together with lots of little ideas rather than a coherent big one. And that thread holding it all together is a hail mary attempt at recapturing an audience’s attention that’s waning and yearning for something better.
So yea, that’s a thesis to start this all out. Maybe a little ambitious, but hey, there isn’t a mandatory structure for whatever this is.
Enough with the bad, we can bring up a positive. Christian Bale is pretty damn good as the villain Gorr. The god killer.
Bale had sworn to never do another superhero movie at The Dark Knight Rises (2012), but he returned to the realm of comic books at the behest of his children. Literally, his children supposedly begged him to take the role. Working on Love And Thunder is a whole different world than The Dark Knight trilogy because nearly every single scene Bale is in involves CGI and a green screen. Not his fault, just the nature of the movie and style of filmmaking.
But hey, Bale still makes it work! Gorr looks great with his emo eye shadow and his seemingly always drooping chin. The way Bale is able to make this villain, who we can all admit is a one-movie throwaway, into a character I wanted to see more of, is rather remarkable. Marvel, in the case of Love And Thunder, fixed its villain problem.
Unfortunately for them, it’s the normal stuff that was botched this time around.
The comedy in Love And Thunder is…a choice. The screaming goats, the Zeus vacation pitstop, the hammers having personalities and the awkward fixation on a catchphrase. The script of Love And Thunder isn’t honed with a sharp knife. Perhaps it wasn’t even sharpened with a blunt knife. Even the sassy lines Chris Hemsworth has thrived on making memorable falls on empty echo ears.
One of my friends and I got into a discussion and I didn’t expect to have such a divergence of opinion. Personally speaking, I didn’t think Natalie Portman was good in this movie. I didn’t think her comedic chops matched with anyone else in the movie. I think her attempts at over-acting and being over-the-top were cringe. Perhaps it’s because I don’t have any connection to Jane Foster the character? Again, I have fallen off the Marvel train, so perhaps my patience and love are dead.
My friend liked Portman’s acting and thought that Jane was the best part of this movie. He thought that she delivered the absurdity of the script better than most. This friend didn’t think that Thor: Love And Thunder was a good movie by any means, but the blame fell on other aspects of the movie.
Waititi has already announced that he is not coming back for a third Thor adventure. It is not a surprise. Waititi wants to be untethered, and Marvel needs to find a way to make it work with different voices.
The thread of consistency between the movies has become frayed. I know I am often harsher than most when it comes to Marvel, but the frustration around Love And Thunder and the entire Marvel cinematic is palpable. It’s not just me deflating its tires.
If you want a reason to watch Thor: Love And Thunder, it’s Christian Bale. He puts in effort and he makes it work. Not saying everyone else doesn’t try, but the job he does bringing a truly menacing and evil vibe is rewarding. He is what you will remember most.
Thor: Love And Thunder is streaming on Disney+.
STANKO RATING: C-
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