Thor: Love and Thunder Review
Heads up, this is a spoiler review! I don’t go into major spoilers, but if you know nothing about the comics or the plot of Thor: Love and Thunder, you may want to skip this and read it after you see the film. Okay, on with my review.
It seems-I’m learning-that I like my superhero films a certain way. I like good guys against bad guys and some sweet action sequences that can blow my mind. That, with a side of humor and a side of romance (if at all) and I’m good. You can even have some heart mixed in, but I don’t go to superhero movies for tugs at the ol’ heartstrings-just saying. Does every comic book film need to be this way? Certainly not, but if you’re going to break that formula you need to make sure you do it well. Too much humor, too much romance, too much heart and things may go awry.
Thor: Love and Thunder almost misses the mark for me. At times it gets a little too silly. Other times it gets a little too romance-y. And the action sequences are often too dark or too fast to even tell what’s going on. These are issues for me. So bad news first:
The scenes that set up the plot of this movie just didn’t last long enough. Gorr’s origin story-which is what the film opens with-and the reason why he becomes the God Butcher is so short lived that I feel cheated. I’ll give allowances for a film to be an extra five or ten minutes longer if it’s able to give me more time to care about the characters on screen. In Thor, we meet Gorr and before you know it, he’s wielding a black sword and hunting down and killing all the gods he can find.
As soon as we see Jane again, she’s got stage 4 cancer and she’s pretty much dying. Next, she’s in the lab and before we know it, she’s wielding Mjolnir and fighting baddies. Again, more time seeing her go through some of those emotions that would help us get more attached would be time well spent.
Another problem I have with the movie is I think it has tone issues. It can’t decide exactly what it is: a comedy? a rom-com? a horror movie? a superhero flick? Remember, too much of any one of them and the movie quickly off balance.
What’s the good news then?
It’s got humor in spades. Of course it would with Taika Waititi in the director’s chair. Some of the gags didn’t really land for me, but I think it may be just the mood I was in. Russel Crowe’s performance as Zeus is greatness. There’s a running gag with Thor’s relationship between his hammer and his axe that made me smile. And the screaming goats annoyed me at first but there’s a scene near the end when they land on some planet or moon where Gorr is that did make me laugh out loud.
The best things about the film is the ending. The ending is really what saves this film. I won’t spoil anything for you, but it left me with a good feeling and got me excited for where Thor might be heading next.
To sort wrap all this up with a bow, I did enjoy Thor: Love and Thunder. I find myself wanting the Marvel films to be epic. In reality some will be great, some will be good, and others will be meh. Love and Thunder was good, not great. I think my expectations were up just a bit too high. I was looking for it to be another Ragnarok, but it just didn’t measure up. Plus, I think I may need to watch it again just for the laughs. I don’t know if that means take my review with a grain of salt but there it is.