It feels more like a promise than a curse. So this is my vow. All gods will die.
I went into Thor: Love & Thunder actually feeling kind of excited. I came out of Multiverse of Madness, as we all know, way more thrilled than any normal person would have been and I was as high on that movie as I was precisely because it had gone so hard bonkers, just gone really crazy. I loved Thor: Ragnarok and, prior to Jojo Rabbit, I had essentially loved every Waititi movie I’d seen. And this isn’t a Jojo Rabbit review, but, um, you know, I’m even more sold on the good things about that movie now because, let’s face it, Thor: Love & Thunder is far, far worse than Jojo Rabbit in every way. Let’s just say that the excitement I walked into the theater with exited the theater quicker than the Guardians did.
And, side note, by the way, this movie does not get the Guardians right. It isn’t terrible, but it’s not as good as Markus & McFeely did with them in Infinity War/Endgame, and even that was occasionally off. I felt this wrongness about the Guardians in Love & Thunder at the time I watched the movie, but having now seen GotG, Vol. 3, it’s become just blindingly obvious that they’re not right here. James Gunn, I think, is the only person who really gets the Guardians. Anyway, that’s a side note.
Back to Love & Thunder, this is the one all your MCU haters have been waiting for, I guess, because I kind of hated this movie, both for all the bad things it kept shoving in my face and for the good things it kept utterly squandering. I’d say this is easily my least favorite MCU movie. Admittedly, I haven’t seen some of the more widely disliked entries, like The Incredible Hulk, but, for instance, this movie isn’t anywhere near as good as Thor: The Dark World, which has kind of been the Thor movie that set the lowbar.
The movie has a couple of good things going for it. Gorr the God Butcher is an interesting character and I find the entire premise of his war on the Gods to be philosophically interesting as well. There’s something compelling in the notion that the Gods, as a whole, have drifted from their purpose, no longer care about the people they are supposed to be protecting and guiding. There’s meat there, but unfortunately, it doesn’t get much exploration. I think Bale’s performance is actually very good; Gorr is genuinely scary at times. There’s a sequence where Thor, Jane and Valkyrie are in this black & white realm and they’re being held prisoners by these kind of tentacles of darkness that’s real nightmare fuel; Bale is great in that scene. Likewise, the notion of Jane Foster as the Mighty Thor is fantastic and I was really excited to see Natalie Portman get to do something interesting with the character. And Portman is good when the movie gives her the chance to be. Again, the idea of Jane dying of cancer and only being sustained by the power of Mjolnir (even as it is also draining her strength) is a powerful one, but the movie has not a whole lot of time for it. And there was so much talk leading up to this movie that it was going to be an epic romance; and look, romance isn’t my favorite genre, but I was here for it. Like a big, brightly-colored space opera/love story? Yes, deliver on the swoon. But I actually felt like Hemsworth and Portman had the least chemistry in this movie that they had in any movie so far. Over the entire MCU, it’s not like they’ve had a whole lot of screen time together. But, yeah, I’d take their chemistry in The Dark World over this, where they both just seem kind of bored when they’re supposed to be being serious.
Overall, the movie is just a tonal disaster. I know that this is often a criticism lobbed at the MCU and I think some of the other movies have had issues with this, but no movie has been this consistently clumsy, annoying and jarring in its tonal shifts. Part of the problem here is that much of the comedy here just doesn’t work; maybe the shift from the scary, horror-influenced Gorr to a little light comedy would work better if the comedy was actually funny, not just annoying. But this movie never met a joke it didn’t want to grind into the ground. The return of Matt Damon, Luke Hemsworth and Sam Neill as Asgardian actors playing Loki, Thor and Odin is a perfect example. That brief joke in Thor: Ragnarok was great, hilariously funny. So, of course they’re back here with another “bad” theatrical scene, but this one is fully twice as long as the scene in Ragnarok, maybe more like three times, and just when you think it’s over, Melissa McCarthy comes on stage as Hela and, look, it’s just not good. And then Damon and Hemsworth just keep coming back through the movie and it’s less funny every single time. But, look, you may ask, what about the screaming goats? They were funny, right? Yes, they WERE funny . . . approximately twelve years ago. I don’t know about anybody else’s experience, but they sucked the air right out of the theater I was in. The first time they showed up, there were some chuckles, none from me, but there were some. After that, every time they did that stupid screaming again, this deathly silence just fell over the entire theater. It was downright stultifying.
And I haven’t even talked about Omnipotence at all; that entire sequence is just absolute garbage. I do love the moment when Tessa Thompson’s Valkyrie kisses a woman’s hand and then falls back into the ship . . . I mean, not because it was a queer moment, just because Tessa Thompson is so damn cool. But, yes, this is the sequence where Russell Crowe shows up as Zeus and is . . . man, as bad as he’s ever been in anything. Yeah, I’ll say that. Find me a worse performance from Crowe. There’s also a throwaway gag about Jesus (who was this aimed at, exactly?) and we finally get to see Korg’s God, Ninny of the Nonny. Yeah, Ninny of the Nonny. He’s played by Waititi, of course, because why not? Does he sing a terrible song? What do you think? Are you infuriated yet? I was.
This actually gets to one of the problems, I think, because this movie is really told from the perspective of Korg. So, maybe that gets you to the place where you can handwave how stupid all the comedy is and how the movie fumbles the dramatic moments. Of course this isn’t an epic romance; Korg has no idea how to tell that story. It’s like, okay, fine, it’s all because Korg is telling the story of the movie and Korg’s kind of an idiot. But that’s why it’s a bad idea to make Korg the viewpoint character of a movie. Like I said above, this movie likes taking jokes that were funny in Ragnarok or were even kind of funny once in this movie and just beating you into submission with them. Korg, it turns out, is a really funny supporting character. As the main narrative voice of the film, he sucks. He sucks hard. He’s awful. So is this movie, really.
Let’s see, anything else positive I want to say before I wrap this up? Let’s see, I said Bale was good, I said Portman was good . . . okay, the bit with Stormbreaker being jealous of Mjolnir was genuinely funny. That shot where Stormbreaker just slowly floated into frame was genuinely hilarious. That actually made me laugh really hard. I liked that they went a different direction with Gorr at the end, that the final climactic scene wasn’t just another punch-up. Yeah, that’s about it. Definitely indicative of something that one of my two or three favorites of the entire franchise (Multiverse of Madness) is immediately followed by my absolute least favorite. Not sure what it’s indicative of. I don’t know what’s going on. What is this movie? Why are we here? What’s happening? Why did they do this? Can I get the **** out of here now? 1 star.
tl;dr – a tonal disaster that squanders what good things it has, whiffs on both drama & quality comedy and is a serious contender for worst film of the entire MCU; the haters are right on this one. 1 star.