Review: Thor: Love and Thunder (2022)

Thor: Love and Thunder (2022)

Rated PG-13 for intense sequences of sci-fi violence and action, language, some suggestive material and partial nudity

Score: 3 out of 5

Thor: Love and Thunder gets the job done, nothing more and nothing less. It provides closure to the relationship between the Mighty Thor and his human love Jane Foster, it's packed with all sorts of cool imagery and a ton of energy courtesy of director and co-writer Taika Waititi, Christian Bale makes for a great villain, it moves at a brisk pace, there aren't really a lot of surprises, and it's held back from greatness by tonal issues as it constantly veers between lighthearted comic adventure and serious drama... and there's really not a whole lot more to say beyond that. It's a Marvel movie. We're fourteen years and dozens of movies and TV shows into this franchise, and you probably know what you like and don't like about these movies by now. Even the lower tier of Marvel movies where this movie comfortably sits is still "pretty good" in my book, especially if you've got kids -- and make no mistake, obligatory PG-13 rating aside, this one was definitely made for the families. It's two hours of empty-calorie popcorn entertainment that feels rather frivolous and falls far below the high standard set by its predecessor Thor: Ragnarok, but I thought it was worth my time.

After the events of Ragnarok and Avengers: Endgame, the surviving Asgardians are now living in Tønsberg, Norway, renamed New Asgard and now serving as a tacky tourist trap, much to the chagrin of Valkyrie, the current King of Asgard who longs for adventure instead of bureaucracy and ribbon-cutting. Thor, meanwhile, is off in space having adventures with the Guardians of the Galaxy, only to soon part ways from them after receiving a distress call from his close friend Sif. As it turns out, there's a new bad guy running around, Gorr the God Butcher. Having been cruelly abandoned and mocked by his planet's god after the death of his daughter, Gorr took revenge when he got his hands on the Necrosword, a weapon capable of slaying gods that granted him all sorts of cool shadow powers on top of it (albeit at the cost of slowly draining his life), and now he travels the galaxy seeking the extinction of the gods, seeing them all as vain, rapacious creatures who live off of the suffering of those they compel to worship them. Thor correctly senses that Gorr will eventually come for him and his fellow Asgardians, and returns home to recruit Valkyrie and the alien warrior Korg to join him in his fight after Gorr kidnaps the children of New Asgard. While he's there, however, he's greeted by a very strange sight: Dr. Jane Foster, the astrophysicist who he had previously fallen in love with, now decked out in her own set of Thor armor and wielding a rebuilt Mjolnir. Jane is dying of cancer, and came to New Asgard after the pieces of Mjolnir seemingly called to her, whereupon they deemed her worthy of wielding the power of Thor. Jane may be fighting alongside him against Gorr, but her return to his life rekindles all the mixed feelings that Thor has had ever since they broke up.

If there's one big overarching problem that drags this movie down, it would be the constant state of tonal whiplash that it suffers from. In the first act especially, it's almost a straight-up comedy, filled with scenes of playful badassery and snarky one-liners, with even a lot of dramatic moments being injected with humor to the point of undermining the stakes involved. A scene where Thor meets Sif after she's been wounded in battle is a case in point, the film using this scene not to highlight how dangerous the villain is but to crack a joke about Sif's frustration that, since she survived this battle, she hasn't punched her ticket to Valhalla yet. It's a common criticism of Marvel movies that I've often brushed off in the past, but I'll be damned if it wasn't especially applicable here. The film tones some of that down once Gorr enters the picture in a major way, but even then, the balance between levity and drama that Taika Waititi struck so well in Ragnarok felt simply off here. In that film, the tone felt like an epic, bombastic death metal album come to life, a place where you'd want larger-than-life heroes and villains spouting hammy lines mocking one another. This film tweaked that formula a bit and tried to inject tons of consciously retro '80s stylings in there, but whereas those may have worked in the Guardians of the Galaxy films, here it clashed with the epic tone of the rest of the film and felt like simply a middling cover of such, never quite able to strike the balance between feel-good nostalgic sleaze on one hand and raw power and might on the other. The result was that, while there were a lot of really cool standalone scenes in this movie, as a whole the tone just did not work.

It's through no fault of the actors, who clearly gave it their all and felt like they were all having a blast. Chris Hemsworth as Thor and Tessa Thompson as Valkyrie both understood the assignment and relished playing these sorts of epic heroes, while Christian Bale stole the show as Gorr, a villain straight out of a dark '80s fantasy flick, the kind of movies that were clearly made with a family audience in mind but still gave a generation of '80s kids nightmares. He nails just the right balance of hammy and genuinely frightening as a cackling bad guy with sympathetic motivations, especially given what we see of the various other gods that the protagonists encounter, and the inhuman makeup work on him only adds to his presence. Despite appearances, he's not a total monster, and his final confrontation with Thor and Jane was one of the best moments in the film. And on that note, perhaps the most interesting character in the film was Jane Foster herself. Not only was it great seeing Natalie Portman finally return to the series in the most awesome way possible, holding her own alongside Hemsworth as an action hero, but her story is central to the film's dramatic core. The power of Thor has given her a second shot at life after her illness took away her strength and vitality, but just like with Gorr and his god-slaying weapon that's slowly killing him, there's a catch, and without spoiling anything, having superpowers does not solve all of Jane's problems. Eventually, she has to confront them head-on the same way she has to fight Gorr. This was almost as much Jane's movie as it was Thor's, and her story was treated with far more seriousness than the madcap comedy of the action and epic journeys, keeping it grounded in something human and heartfelt. She was this movie's secret weapon, and the thing that kept it from flying off the rails.

The action is mostly serviceable, carried more by the soundtrack and the rock music needle drops than by the rather workmanlike direction, but the visuals outside the action scenes are a feast. A trip that the protagonists take into a "city of the gods" was filled with visual splendor and grandeur, anchored by a brief but memorable scene of Russell Crowe as the Greek god Zeus, portrayed here as the kind of self-centered jerk who makes Thor wonder if Gorr doesn't kind of have a point with his hatred of the gods. (A rather surprisingly accurate translation of Greek mythology.) One of the big things in "Phase 4" of the MCU is that it's not been afraid to go "out there" into the cosmic and the truly unnatural, and the fact that this film doesn't go quite as far as, say, the TV show Loki did in that regard is due mainly to just how weird a lot of recent stuff in this franchise can get. This movie wanted to take me on a journey across the universe to some epically awe-inspiring places, from the decadence of Omnipotence City to the bleak center of the universe, a placed where the movie literally turns black and white barring a few flashes of color as the heroes gear up to confront Gorr. And it certainly made the universe look and feel exciting.

The Bottom Line

Thor: Love and Thunder may be one of Marvel's lesser movies, but it's still a fun time, and there are far worse ways to waste two hours of your time than this. If you're a fan of these, check it out.