'Love and Thunder' Tries To Consolidate All Three Prior Thors
Starring Chris Hemsworth, Natalie Portman, Christian Bale, Tessa Thompson, Taika Waititi, Russell Crowe, Jaimie Alexander, Chris Pratt, Dave Bautista, Karen Gillan, Pom Klementieff, Sean Gunn, Vin Diesel, Bradley Cooper
Rated PG-13
Comedy, action
Run time: 2 hr, 5 min
Directed and written by Taika Waititi
In theaters July 8, 2022
With Ragnarok taking the MCU fandom by storm, there was even more hype around this follow-up. Taika Watiti at the helm, Hemsworth cracking jokes, the excellent supporting cast in Thompson and - again - Waititi and Portman coming back. What more could you ask for? The trailer was just as comedy heavy and brightly colored as the previous installment. It was clearly the continuation of what had become the second set of Thor films, with the third being such a departure from the first two iterations. However, in this one, it wasn’t straight-up Ragnarok. In fact, it seemed like the creative team behind the movie decided to cherry pick elements from all the other films, whether they really went together or not.
The plot is pretty straightforward, as far as comic book stories go. Thor (Hemsworth) is on his space-saving adventures with the Guardians of the Galaxy (the last seven names on that cast list up there) but feels something missing. They part ways when he discovers a distress call from Lady Sif (Alexander) and splits off to go to her aid, learning about a man who is determined to kill all the gods (Bale) after his prayers went unanswered and he became disillusioned. Thor returns to New Asgard with Korg (Waititi) and reunites with Valkyrie (Thompson), and, shockingly, a Thor-ified Jane (Portman). They go on a journey to save their community and the other deities throughout the universe, with some amusing and intriguing waypoints as they go.
The biggest fault of this movie is having to live up to Ragnarok. That entry into the MCU truly upended things in regards to the mythological hero and reformed him into a new, lighter god of thunder. The problem is, once the bar has been set, it somehow has to not only be lived up to, but surpassed. And while Love and Thunder is a solid enough movie, it couldn’t do that. The humor is still there, but it feels more forced than other Waititi scripts. There is an element of romantic comedy that should have elevated it above the other love stories in the Marvel world, but it erred on the side of cliche. Then, Love and Thunder pulls from the mythological gravitas of the original film, incorporating other heroes from the mythos and other legends that feel more than standard comic book fare. With Bale’s villain, they’re drawing on the darker side of the appropriately named, but ill-fated, Dark World. When you put all those characteristics into a blender, rather than getting the best combination of them all, it comes off as confused.
Believe me - I wanted to love this movie. And considering my rating, it would probably look like I did. Instead, I was disappointed, even more so than I was after the most recent Dr. Strange. Maybe it was due to too-high expectations, but the sum of its parts didn’t equal up like I had hoped. I definitely had moments of both uncontrollable giggling and quiet tears. It just didn’t capture me as much as I have come to expect in the post-End Game world. There was a very lackluster effort to incorporate other sexualities that came from a couple of offhand comments and split-second scenes. I needed more to the relationship between Thor and Jane than we got. I wished for more time to understand the intricacies of the god-killer. I just needed so much that I didn’t receive. When discussing it post-viewing, all I could articulate was the issues I had with it, and then I was trying to convince myself that I liked it. It had plenty of standout moments, as most Marvel films do, but if given the option to rewatch this or Ragnarok, I’m always going with the latter.