'Thor: Love and Thunder' movie review: Lots of love, very little thunder

The film works when Thor and Jane are front and centre and shows gods as spineless beings, but butchers Gorr, its main villain

Thor: Love and Thunder

Director: Taika Waititi

Cast: Chris Hemsworth, Natalie Portman, Christian Bale, Tessa Thompson

Score: 2/5 stars

Thor, the 1,500-something-year-old space Viking returns for his fourth solo adventure, and to be very honest, it's actually, kinda not good. It may be that the beats Love and Thunder follows are rather broadly similar to Ragnarok, director Taika Waititi's previous journey with the God of Thunder, or it may be due to the failings of a weak script - either way, it doesn't manage to maximise its potential.

The Thor movies - or rather the Marvel Cinematic Universe at large - appear to be at a crossroads right now. Apart from Loki on the streaming side recently, the MCU appears to have lost its grip on building an effective arc, resorting instead to a villain-of-the-week format with stakes so detached from anything that came before, they might as well not matter.

With Doctor Strange 2, it wasn't much of an issue because it relied heavily on Sam Raimi's wit and visual style to present semi-effective horror, and Loki was just a mind-bending adventure with the ultimate goal of expanding the universe. Love and Thunder, however, has the benefit of neither.

That is not to say its visual style is ineffective, it's just not original anymore. Waititi does little to distinguish this film from Ragnarok, apart from adding a couple of giant screaming goats and a section of the film shown entirely in monochrome. Apart from these, the film feels like a giant mixed bag of cool vignettes stitched together that relies on convenient plot devices rather than a truly cohesive story.

The movie's plot follows Thor and Mighty Thor's (Jane Foster, who gets Thor's powers thanks to actual literal magic) battle with Gorr the God Butcher, who in his quest for revenge against every god for abandoning him and his daughter to death, does very little actual god butchering. In terms of story, it's a surface-skirting film with stakes as small as they've ever been in a Marvel movie.

Gorr, for instance, gets a very touching introduction as a father desperate to keep his daughter safe. The realisation that the gods don't actually care about her death drives him off a cliff and into a quest for vengeance, similar to how the loss of his family drove him to vengeance in the comics. Unlike the comics, however, Gorr's characterisation fails to go much beyond that as it treats him as the aforementioned villain-of-the-week fare, just a slightly strong one.

The film only really works from a storytelling perspective when it focuses on Thor and Jane's relationship. After discarding their romance like a rag in Ragnarok, Waititi brings back this plot thread and uses it to provide tension between the characters and drive them forward to achieve what they seek - be it purpose or love or hope.

Besides the Thor-Mighty Thor dynamic, the one thing the movie actually does well is in showing just how detestable the gods are. Facing the threat of Gorr, the gods choose to hide in a golden city, drinking, eating and (talking about) fornicating their days away - driven by blind confidence that Gorr can't just show up at their door and kill every single one of them. Chief among the deities is Zeus (Russell Crowe), who in his short time on screen manages to be every bit as disagreeable as the Zeus of Greek myth in certain aspects.

Beyond this, the film is simply a series of cool vignettes sewn together. We see both Thors and Valkyrie tear things up in a CG-driven spectacle featuring the gods and the now-classic faceless monster horde, we see Thor somewhat depressed over a lack of love and the hunt to find it, and we see Gorr as a kind of deranged, kind of sad entity that the film never quite decides what to do with, ultimately wasting him as a character. It's made worse because Christian Bale really acts the hell out of this unfortunately butchered butcher but that's just how the interstellar rainbow boat floats in Thor: Love and Thunder, a movie that has quite a bit of love but very little thunder.