In Thor: Love and Thunder, the studio’s machines frequently pause in the 92nd Marvel movie (OK, 3rd) to be screened at the theater this year, and the photo opens a portal to another dimension: that. Incorporating a star, Chris Hemsworth, and wholesale self-parody, a pair of giant screaming goats gallop along the Rainbow Highway, Russell Crowe wears a frivolous skirt, and Shirley Temple curls. As the film temporarily slips into the parallel realm of play and joy, you can feel Taika Waititi having a good time — and it’s infectious.
This is the fourth “Thor” movie in 11 years, following “Thor: Ragnarok” (2017), and the second movie directed by Waititi. The movie was everywhere, but it was fun (enough) and had a lightness that proved to be released for the series and Hemsworth. “Love and Thunder” is stupid and thinner than any of its predecessors. Much happens in the overloaded fashion of Marvel Studios. However, the series dumped many of the previous components, such as pretending to be Shakespeare, nosy relatives, and, decisively, Thor’s pious grandeur, so the new film is a rescue mission with jokes, tears, and smackdowns. It will be played like.
It begins with a paste-like, almost unrecognizable Christian Bale who signed up to Marvel as the villain of the spoiler name Gorr the God Butcher after being released from his DC Dark Knight mission. Waititi immediately sketched Gore’s background and gave it a tragic cast. Believing that he was betrayed by the god he once worshiped, Gore is committed to destroying other gods. It’s a potentially rich storytelling terrain, especially given Thor’s height and Marvel’s role as a modern myth maker. However, while Veil plays the role of his throat, his habit invests in the character with the strength of friction, but Gore unfortunately proves dull.
In most cases, Gore only gives Thor another opportunity to play a hero. Hemsworth does it with stellar deadpan and suppleness. Not only because slave camerawork likes to remind you, he’s always fun to watch in that role, he looks terribly energetic with or without his clothes. Hemsworth knows how to move, which is amazing given his muscular bulk and reassuring of his beauty. He also learned how to develop and punk Thor’s innate poposite, but by the time the final credit was rolled back in Ragnarok, his arrogance was terrible. Thor is still a god, but he is now a big idiot.
To that end, Thor enters the midst of a greyish-red light-washed battlefield, grooming, posing, and showboating with Marvel’s “Galaxy Guardian” character. Backing up the Guardians (Chris Pratt, Bradley Cooper’s vocal raccoon, etc.), Thor defeats his enemies with normal exaggeration — hitting the ground, reaching to heaven, and flipping his hair. — And the new hammer is a backhoe excavator. He also destroys a temple visible just outside the airport gift shop. This synergistic foreplay isn’t pretty and isn’t the rest of the movie, but it reveals Waititi’s sensibility, his irreverence, and his taste for kitsch.
From the beginning, the “Thor” series has pushed and pulled its title character by enshrining his supernatural identity, undercutting it, and lifting him up to hit the Earth. The film emphasizes Thor’s weaknesses, mostly as a drawback. He has daddy’s problems, his brother’s rivalry, and romantic pain. God, they are like us! Thor’s life of love humanized him for good and evil, but his romance with astrophysicist Natalie Portman’s Jane Foster served best as a ballast of his actions. .. Jane wasn’t funny despite Portman’s ardent smile, but she came back after sitting in her last movie.
Why encore? Waititi, who wrote the script with Jennifer Kaytin Robinson, doesn’t seem to know what else Thor can do. By the end of “Ragnarok”, the character had been repeatedly reduced in size. He quarreled with his brother and the most witty foil (Tom Hiddleston as Loki). His long hair was cut off, his kingdom was wiped out, and the big names who helped fill the holes in the story with their magnetic force and personality left. Anthony Hopkins (Tall’s dad) has been sent off, and Cate Blanchett (sis) has also been sent off. Thor fought, loved, and lost, and then he packed his pounds and hung with the Avengers.
“Love and Thunder” revives the “Thor” franchise with regular quips and beats, programmatic timing blowouts, brand extension details, kidnappings, and the underutilized welcome of Tessa Thompson. Alas, her Valkyrie has a shorter screen time than Jane, who was given a crisis, and has special powers, a blonde explosion, and muscles that inflate and contract like party balloons. Jane’s new talent doesn’t help much in the story and is read as a faithful nod to women’s empowerment (thanks). Portman does what he can, but she’s so tightly wound that it doesn’t synchronize with the loose goose rhythms like Thompson and Hemsworth.
Waititi’s playfulness highlights “love and thunder,” but Thor’s liking, his claim to dignity and masculinity are a creative dead end. The film is particularly appealing to Hemsworth, Thompson and Crow. These Zeus run through a sequence of bare ass Thor and fainted minions. It’s a fun, cheerful and vulgar interlude, and critically, it’s the pure alienity of these beings, with vanity, cruelty, deeds, mysteries and powers, turning reality into a myth and a story into a dream. Reminds me. Like movie stars, the gods are not like us. Of course, that’s one of the reasons we invented them.
Thor: Love and Thunder
It is rated as PG-13 due to the violence of superheroes. Execution time: 2 hours 5 minutes. At the theater.
