Thor: Love and Thunder
Cast & Key People
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Our Review
The comedy overdose. Taika Waititi doubled the Ragnarok formula and broke it: where the 2017 film used jokes to cut the epic, Love and Thunder uses epic as an excuse for jokes, and nearly every dramatic beat gets undercut within seconds. Christian Bale’s Gorr the God Butcher, a grieving father who takes a necrosword to the divine, is genuinely horrifying, a gothic wraith in the film’s striking black and white shadow realm. Then the movie keeps cutting away from him to screaming goats.
The Guardians cameo is four scenes of Thor being unwanted. The plot assembles Thor, Valkyrie, and Jane Foster’s Mighty Thor, cancer patient wielding a reforged Mjolnir, against Gorr at the Omni City of the gods, a hedonist paradise staged like a bacchanal. Natalie Portman commits fully to the dying hero material and the film keeps refusing to let her scenes breathe. The shadow realm stretch and the fall of the gods are the sequences where the film briefly becomes what it could have been.
Kids will love the goats. The ending, Thor raising an orphaned girl as a warrior, aims for mythic and lands on sitcom. The film had a real story about gods who ignore prayers and the mortals who pay for it, and it keeps apologizing for telling it.
Our score: 4/10, the funniest script ick of Phase Four.
Seasons
Season guides coming soon.
