Thor: Love and Thunder

 

When his daughter Love (India Hemsworth) dies and his prayers go unanswered, Gorr (Christian Bale), a devout follower of the god Rapu (Jonathan Brugh) takes up the powerful-yet-cursed Necrosword and slays the callous, mocking deity, vowing that all gods must die. This puts the “God Butcher” on a collision with Thor Odinson (Chris Hemsworth), the Asgardian god of thunder, who has been fighting alongside the Guardians of the Galaxy but finds little pleasure or purpose outside of combat. Meanwhile, Thor’s former girlfriend, the renowned astrophysicist Jane Foster (Natalie Portman) is dying of cancer. Desperate for a cure, she wonders if Asgardian magic might hold the answer. The refugee settlement turned tourist attraction of New Asgard, Norway, run by the last surviving Valkyrie (Tessa Thompson) seems to have what everyone is looking for.

 

The fourth solo Thor film, Love and Thunder is helmed by Taika Waititi, who injected a badly needed dose of vitality into the franchise with 2017’s Ragnarok. Waititi also returns as the voice of amiable alien rock monster Korg, who serves as the film’s narrator, and the film is an odd mixture of Waititi’s trademark awkward humor, 1980s nostalgia, and inspiration from Jason Aaron’s divisive comic book run. The results are often entertaining, sometimes heartfelt, tonally catastrophic, and narratively frustrating.

 

Perhaps the biggest gripe that can be leveled against Love and Thunder is that its character work is largely threadbare. Thor’s “finding out who he is” arc was largely explored in Ragnarok, and this feels like a rehash. Jane has largely been absent from the MCU mythos for years, and so her sudden cancer diagnosis and equally sudden acquisition of Asgardian power feels less like character development and more like sudden change to move the story forward. The one exception to this is Gorr, whom a bald, ashen-skinned, shadow-ensconced Bale renders both creepy and sympathetic (perhaps too much so given the relative absence of benign deities).

 

However, Love and Thunder’s tonal ping-pong ultimately works against Bale’s effectiveness here. Films – and especially MCU films – can balance comedy and action, and prior Thor entries did this well (pronouncedly so in Ragnarok, but even the original Thor had its hilarious pet shop horse demand). Here, however, the effect is that of a romantic comedy spliced together with a much darker (aesthetically and tonally) action-drama, and the two strands undercut rather than complement each other.

 

None of this is the actors’ fault. Hemsworth might not be doing anything radically new with the character, but he still makes for an excellent Thor. Jane’s compacted arc aside, Portman’s return to a prominent role is welcome, and here she gets to display combat prowess to go with her and Hemsworth’s banter. There’s also a supremely hammy Russell Crowe as Zeus, sporting a selfish attitude (no surprise there) and a confusing (Grecco-Italian?) accent.

 

Moreover, for all of its storytelling faults, Love and Thunder is, at times, both funny and fun. Toothgnasher and Toothgrinder, pullers of the mythological Thor’s chariot, are rendered here as a pair of inappropriately screaming goats, Matt Damon and Luke Hemsworth return as members of a cheesy Asgardian acting troupe (joined by Melissa McCarthy playing Hela with all the subtlety of the Wicked Witch of the West), and the film as a whole is a long, strange ode to Guns n Roses (!). As an added perk, Hemsworth’s and Portman’s children pop up in small but important roles, and some of Thor’s all-but-forgotten comrades make a return as well.

 

Ultimately, Love and Thunder does little to advance the Marvel Cinematic Universe’s increasingly byzantine mythology, nor is it a stellar stand-alone film. It is, however, an amusing way to kill two hours.