After embarking on a series of adventures with the Guardians of the Galaxy, a battle-weary Thor (Chris Hemsworth) prepares to seek out a life of peace before a distressing message from an old friend warns him of the threat of Gorr (Christian Bale) – a cursed being on a personal mission to end the existence of gods. When Gorr sets his sights on Earth and Thor’s ex-girlfriend turned super-hero Jane Foster (Natalie Portman), Thor and Jane embark on a journey across the universe in search of a way to defeat Gorr and find meaning in their lives again.
Starring: Chris Hemsworth, Natalie Portman, Christian Bale, Tessa Thompson, Taika Waititi, Chris Pratt, Dave Bautista, Karen Gillan & Russell Crowe
Watch it now in cinemas
Love and Thunder is a Taika Waititi movie through and through, for better and for worse. 2017’s Ragnarok signalled a reinvigoration of the uptight Norse god – infusing Thor with a bro-ish charm and dim sense of humour and surrounding him with a colourful cast of characters – in a move that was unexpected but welcomed, packing all the action and emotional character beats that Marvel fans expected into an exciting new world. The sequel is Waititi fully let loose and in doing so, Love and Thunder loses itself in the incessant improvisational comedy Waititi so clearly enjoys. It’s not that it doesn’t work sometimes, but when the characters and story are sacrificed and you’re exhausted rather than elated at the end of it all, something isn’t working.
As a character, Thor has undergone a lot of reinvention throughout his many appearances in the MCU, and the start of Love and Thunder finds him in an interesting contemplative place. Pairing the God of Thunder with the Guardians of the Galaxy seems like the obvious next step in this reinvention, a natural segue into comedic hijinks that can exist on a smaller scale than infinity stone-seeking titans and Asgard-ending colossuses. Thor has been through so much, and it is natural that he should feel some fatigue. Waititi’s solution, then, is to shift this fatigue onto the viewer, completely undercutting any exploration of Thor’s mental state with joke after joke – rarely soliciting anything beyond than a chuckle – to the point where even the Guardians get so sick of it they leave.
Marvel movies have always leaned into comedy, with a quick quip often underpinning dramatic moments so as not to let things get too serious, but Taika takes Love and Thunder into full-blown comedy territory. The problem is quantity over quality. The Waititi schtick – off-kilter, improvisational one-liners interjected at awkward times – is so tired at this point, after films like Free Guy, Lightyear and Jojo Rabbit in the intervening years, that two hours of nothing else is simply interminable. Very few of the jokes here break from the formula, and those that do are rarely given more than a second to breathe before a handful more are thrown at you. This endless stream of gags wreaks havoc on the main storyline’s pacing, creating a hollow emptiness that often means you completely tune out until a serious dramatic moment is suddenly thrown into the mix and shocks you into paying attention again.
It’s a shame given Waititi’s track record. His films have always proudly worn their hearts on their sleeves and leaned into really dramatically resonant emotions, and those moments are buried here underneath all the comedy. Jane and Thor’s goofy reunion is underpinned by a heart-wrenching reality check that always threatens to boil over and create a genuinely moving scene, but the theme is never given a substantial amount of screen time to turn the tide against the onslaught. Christian Bale’s Gorr the God Butcher could have provided a moving counterpoint to Thor and Jane’s journey of loss, and Bale is giving an incredibly fun performance here, but is tossed aside and seems to only be brought back into the fold whenever a studio executive has told Waititi that joke time is over and it’s time to get back to business.
Ultimately what saves Love and Thunder from approaching The Dark World territory is Hemsworth’s utter commitment to the role. Thor is as much a part of him now as Harry Potter is to Daniel Radcliffe and the film is carried by Hemsworth’s bumbling swagger and charm. There’s an ease about him, as someone so supremely confident in this character, that you as an audience feel a certain level of confidence in letting him take Thor in new directions knowing he truly cares. The comedy may fall flat a shocking amount of the time, but it certainly isn’t Hemsworth’s fault, and a lot of the jokes that work, only do because of him. The same sadly can’t be said for Natalie Portman’s Jane Foster, who is saddled with some of the worst material in the film and given an incredibly rushed arc that doesn’t allow her to really stretch as an actor, outside of the impressive physicality she displays once powered up.
It’s been a while since we’ve had a truly disappointing sequel in the MCU but Thor: Love and Thunder is unfortunately just that. With a returning Taika Waititi that refuses to tone down his idiosyncratic humour and take the time to sit with his characters, the first fourth outing for a Marvel hero is a disappointingly exhausting one, despite Chris Hemsworth’s best efforts to imbue renewed vigour into a character audiences have loved for over a decade now. There isn’t much to love, but a few sparks here and there suggest the thunder could be brought back in the future, it just might be time that Taika took a step back.