The Doctor’s Diagnosis: C-
Thor: Ragnarok is one of my favorite movies in the Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU), largely because the chemistry between the main characters combined with the quirky humor and tone set it apart from other MCU entries. Returning director Taika Waititi apparently took one lesson from the success of Ragnarok: people like non-stop jokes, quality and appropriate context be damned, so we need to crank that shit to 11. Consequently, Thor: Love and Thunder is an obnoxious chore of a film that often feels like it was rewritten by a ten-year-old that looked at every potentially dramatic and interesting moment in the script and thought it would work better as a goofy-ass meme. The majority of this movie feels like the cinematic equivalent of having that kid show you Tik Tok videos that you are supposed to find hilarious, but instead just leave you pondering what happened to the world when you weren’t paying attention.
When last we saw Thor, he had joined the Guardians of the Galaxy and set off for adventures across the universe. Hopefully you weren’t too excited about that because apparently Marvel decided to abandon it. Thor leaves the Guardians at the beginning of the film after discovering that Gorr the God Butcher (played by Christian Bale) has gone on a deicidal killing spree. Reteaming with Valkyrie (Tessa Thompson), he discovers that Dr. Jane Foster, his ex-girlfriend played by a returning Natalie Portman, now wields his hammer and has assumed the title of Mighty Thor. The three of them, and some infuriatingly annoying side characters, set off to stop Gorr.
I know that I complain a lot of Marvel’s humor (and I’ll stop complaining when they stop being so awful at it), but this is one of the worst examples of how their formulaic comedic beats and characters ruin movies. At least with something like Eternals or Shang-Chi, the movie was going to be crap anyway. Thor: Love and Thunder is more irritating because it shows that Marvel has become reluctant to let a single fucking moment happen without making a godawful joke. This is a movie that deals largely with cancer and the death of children, yet has the gravitas of a Baby Shark singalong because nothing can happen unless it’s interrupted by a bro-ish rock monster or a pack of screaming goats (yeah, they are goats and they’re constantly screaming; that’s the joke, hold your applause). This fucking movie has a scene that begins with a character breaking something in anger as she physically deteriorates from cancer. That same scene ends with characters dancing to a Mary J. Blige song. You know why? Because Marvel thinks you’re a fucking moron, that’s why. Because these movies can no longer have a serious moment, even when it’s a frigging cancer diagnosis, unless it ends with a joke that’s been tested on a group of low-achieving fifth graders. If these characters went back in time to the assassination of Lincoln, one of them would probably say “oh no you didn’t!” and then dance off to a Cardi B song.
I’m not going to cut-and-paste my usual text about Marvel comic-relief characters, which is damn near everyone in this movie, except to say that this movie really made me miss Kat Dennings. She appears in one scene in this movie, ironically one of the few non-comedic scenes, and it really made me reflect on how much the MCU has changed now that I long for the days when Dennings was the mood-killing comic relief character. Sure, she was terrible in the first two Thor movies, but at least then I got to look at Kat Dennings for an entire movie. Now I’m stuck with rock monsters and screaming goats. It really puts things into perspective, like how I thought Halloween 6 was rock-bottom for that franchise back in 1995. After six additional films, I don’t think that Halloween 6 is that bad. So, scientifically speaking, screaming goats are to Kat Dennings as Rob Zombie’s Halloween 2 is to Halloween 6. That should be an SAT question.
When the film isn’t bludgeoning you with that nonsense, it is still painfully missing the chemistry between Thor, Hulk and Loki that made Ragnarok work. Even Valkyrie is largely wasted in this entry, as the focus is primarily on Thor and Jane, who continue to have the chemistry of oil and water. Much of the humor here is of the “will they or won’t they?” variety, for which I can’t even muster the enthusiasm for an indifferent shrug. As great of an actress as Natalie Portman is, comedy is not her strong suit and multiple bits with her trying to come up with a catchphrase and discussing how this is her first big villain all fall painfully flat. Comedy sequels, even those that keep the same cast, almost never work because humor is so built on chemistry and timing that replicating it is like trying to capture lighting in a bottle a second time. This movie is trying to recapture the humor of Ragnarok, but is doing so with a largely different cast, several of whom are not known for being funny, and the result is mostly disastrous.
The one saving grace is Christian Bale as Gorr, who single-handedly lifted this movie an entire letter grade. I want to see the movie that Bale thinks that he was making because it’s something completely different from the rest of the cast. The tragedy of this film is that a common problem with MCU movies is lame, generic villains. Thor: Love and Thunder has arguably the best, most tragic and most three-dimensional villain ever featured in one of these movies. Gorr’s origin, shown in the opening scenes of the film, is heart-wrenching and the rage that this man feels is simultaneously relatable and frightening. These are also the only scenes in the film that are allowed to be serious and Bale plays it completely straight, as if he was tricked into doing this movie by reading only those few pages of the script. Sadly, he then disappears for the entire middle portion of the film, allowing us to focus on bullshit rather than the one interesting character in the movie. Thanks, Disney.
Somewhere between the goofy, generic bullshit that the MCU has devolved into and the heart-attack seriousness of Joker and The Batman, comic book movies need to find a happy medium again. Thor: Love and Thunder is perhaps the best example of the one extreme, as Disney’s obsession with formula and mass appeal has reached a point where even topics like cancer, the death of children, struggles with faith and deicide are treated as mere framing devices for childish humor and merchandising possibilities. Thank god for Christian Bale, as this is the weakest C- grade that I’ve given and it would be a D- if not for his efforts to bring some dignity to this otherwise abysmal movie.
Image By: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thor%3A_Love_and_Thunder#/media/File:Thor_Love_and_Thunder_poster.jpeg
