There’s an existential question hanging over Marvel movies these days: Can a director with a unique personal vision bring a fresh sensibility to the decades-spanning juggernaut of corporate product that these movies have become? Taika Waititi, who directed Thor: Love and Thunder, did it once before, with Thor: Ragnarok, arguably one of the funnier and more idiosyncratic Marvel movies to date. Another respected auteur, Chloé Zhao, didn’t fare so well with last year’s lackluster Eternals.
The Marvel Cinematic Universe, having engineered the look, pacing and overall vibe of their comics-based superhero films all the way back in 2008 with the first Iron Man, has proven largely impervious to any injection of personality or viewpoint that doesn’t square with the house style. The movies are fun, cartoony and maximalist with CGI renderings of action and magic, showcasing hammy and self-serious performances from a stable of solid actors. When the formula works, the films capture the mind-expanding spirit of the comics, putting imagery on screen that one never imagined witnessing in live-action. At their worst, the films fall into a rote tempo of exposition peppered with one-liners, interspersed with explosions and effects that feel weightless and dull. With Thor: Love and Thunder—the 29th Marvel film in the past 14 years—Waititi has managed to turn in an eye-popping spectacle that still feels like one of his independent projects, bearing his fingerprints (and voice-over) throughout. Your appetite for the Waititi-esque brand of quirk will determine your mileage here.
Scripted by the director with Jennifer Kaytin Robinson, this fourth standalone Thor film finds our Nordic-derived superhero (Chris Hemsworth)—via one of several breezy montages—getting back into fighting shape upon news that a god killer is on the loose. Natalie Portman returns to the role of Dr. Jane Foster, which she played in the first two Thor movies, but this time she’s got a lot more happening. On the one hand, she’s dying of Stage 4 cancer; on the other, she’s taken on the mantle of Mighty Thor herself, via the fealty of her space Viking ex-boyfriend’s old hammer, Mjölnir. Things get weird. Sure, Thor Classic has his own new hammer, Stormbreaker, but the whole apotheosis thing makes the reunion of old lovers especially awkward. That awkwardness flourishes in dialogue where cringey lines are played for laughs, extending several beats too long to milk the comedy.
Indeed, as with Ragnarok, comedy is the dominant mode of the film. Will diehard Marvel fans be charmed or repelled as the complex mythology of the Avengers saga is used as raw material for hijinks and slapstick? The big baddy this time is Gorr the God Butcher, played with wet-mouthed creepiness by Christian Bale. Gorr is scheming to murder all the gods to avenge his losses, especially his loss of faith, and he’s definitely coming after the ones you can name from Greek mythology lessons. Russell Crowe appears in a brief and bizarre cameo as the granddaddy of them all, Zeus, featuring an accent that is either authentic, offensive or completely made up. The absurdity fits right in with the tone of everything else.
Thor has always been one of the stranger Marvel characters, drawn from historical Norse mythology to comingle with 20th-century comic book superheroes like Spider-Man and Captain America. But don’t they all spring from the same human need for gods and champions? It’s one of the charms of this film that these disparate strands of cultural history are fully braided together, showing us a vision of Mount Olympus that doesn’t appear in the old myths.
With this outing, the Thor character is the only Marvel superhero with four standalone films to his name. This is surely partly due to Hemsworth’s almost supernatural charisma. As a leading man, he fluidly glides between self-deprecating comedy and sweat-glistening action, and he brings an even more outlandish physique to this portrayal, having bulked up to Hulk-like proportions. It’s not a template many other actors could fill, and it’s partly why Portman’s attempt to take on the expanded role feels underwhelming. She doesn’t seem to consistently find the tone of her scenes, while Hemsworth plunges ahead with equal parts bombast and bashfulness, just as one would expect from a god who doesn’t quite know himself. The scenes featuring his relationships with his current hammer and his ex-weapon—it’s complicated—make for some brilliant moments of absurdity and sincerity which Hemsworth underplays to great effect.
Much of the action is choreographed to a Guns N’ Roses soundtrack, which feels like a calculated move on the part of the filmmakers to nail a particular vibe. Fittingly for a story about the gods of thunder, everything from the credits to the production design is very metal, but it might have landed more authentically with music choices from farther outside the corporate radio mainstream. But maybe Waititi is a huge GNR fan? And maybe Waititi’s sensibility is now, by definition, that of a giant corporate juggernaut, because Marvel swallows up and assimilates every artist that comes into contact with its intellectual properties. The product, it turns out, is fun: the movie is a blast! Waititi’s affinity for goofy characters foisting their awkwardness upon one another makes for a charming twist on the Marvel formula, but in the end not even the gods are powerful enough to survive the steamroller of this cinematic universe that compacts everything into the same massive and unending storyline. And that almost sounds like the scheme of a supervillain.
Photo courtesy of Walt Disney Pictures
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