‘Thor: Love and Thunder’ Review: A God’s Comic Twilight

Every now and then in “Thor: Love and Thunder,” the 92nd Marvel film to hit theaters this yr (OK, the third), the studio equipment hits pause, and the image opens a portal to a different dimension: Its star, Chris Hemsworth, embraces wholesale self-parody, a pair of large screaming goats gallop alongside a rainbow freeway and Russell Crowe flounces round in a flirty skirt and Shirley Temple curls. Because the film briefly slips right into a parallel realm of play and pleasure, you may really feel the director Taika Waititi having an excellent time — and it’s infectious.

That is the fourth “Thor” film in 11 years and the second that Waititi has directed, following “Thor: Ragnarok” (2017). That film was far and wide, however it was humorous (sufficient) and had a lightness that proved liberating for the collection and Hemsworth. “Love and Thunder” is sillier than any of its predecessors, and thinner. Rather a lot occurs in overstuffed Marvel Studios trend. However as a result of the collection has jettisoned lots of its earlier parts — its Shakespearean pretensions, meddlesome family members and, crucially, Thor’s godly grandeur — the brand new film roughly performs like a rescue mission with jokes, tears and smackdowns.

It begins with a pasty, near-unrecognizable Christian Bale, who, having been relieved of his DC Darkish Knight duties, has signed up with Marvel as a villain with the spoiler title of Gorr the God Butcher. Waititi rapidly sketches in Gorr’s background, giving it a tragic solid. Believing himself betrayed by the god he as soon as worshiped, Gorr is dedicated to destroying different deities. It’s probably wealthy storytelling terrain, notably given Thor’s stature and Marvel’s position as a recent mythmaker. However whereas Bale takes the position by the throat, as is his behavior, investing the character with frictional depth, Gorr proves disappointingly boring.

For probably the most half, Gorr merely offers Thor one other likelihood to play the hero, which Hemsworth does with a stellar deadpan and considerable suppleness. He’s all the time been enjoyable to look at within the position and never simply because, because the slavering camerawork likes to remind you, he appears awfully wonderful with or with out garments. Hemsworth is aware of how you can transfer, which is stunning given his muscled bulk, and is relaxed together with his magnificence. He’s additionally realized how you can deploy — and puncture — Thor’s inborn pomposity, though by the point the ultimate credit rolled in “Ragnarok” that haughtiness had was shtick. Thor continues to be a god, but in addition he’s now an important huge goof.

To that finish, Thor enters midfight on a battlefield washed in grayish crimson mild, preening and posing and showboating alongside characters from Marvel’s “Guardians of the Galaxy.” With Guardians (Chris Pratt, the raccoon voiced by Bradley Cooper, and so on.) on backup, Thor vanquishes the enemy together with his customary hyperbole — he strikes the bottom, reaches for the heavens, flips his hair — and a brand new hammer the scale of a backhoe shovel. He additionally destroys a temple that appears proper out of an airport present store. This synergistic foreplay isn’t fairly, and neither is the remainder of the film, however it pronounces Waititi’s sensibilities, his irreverence and style for kitsch.

From the beginning, the “Thor” collection has pushed and pulled at its title character, by turns enshrining and undercutting his supernatural id, elevating him up solely to deliver him crashing again right down to Earth. The films have, virtually to a fault, emphasised Thor’s frailties: He has daddy points, a sibling rivalry and romantic woes. Gods, they’re identical to us! Thor’s love life humanized him for good and unhealthy, although his romance with an astrophysicist — Natalie Portman’s Jane Foster — labored finest as ballast for the he-man motion. Jane wasn’t attention-grabbing, regardless of Portman’s febrile smiles, however, after sitting out the final film, she’s again.

Why the encore? Effectively, principally as a result of Waititi, who wrote the script with Jennifer Kaytin Robinson, doesn’t appear to know what else he can do with Thor. By the top of “Ragnarok,” the character had been repeatedly lower right down to measurement. He’d squabbled together with his brother and wittiest foil (Tom Hiddleston as Loki). His lengthy hair was chopped off and his kingdom annihilated, and gone too had been the heavyweights who had helped fill the story’s holes with their magnetism and character. Anthony Hopkins (Thor’s dad) exited, as did Cate Blanchett (sis). Thor fought, beloved and misplaced, after which he packed on the kilos and went to hold with the Avengers.

“Love and Thunder” revs up the “Thor” franchise once more with the standard quips and beats, programmatically timed blowouts, brand-extending particulars, a kidnapping and a welcome if underused Tessa Thompson. Her Valkyrie, alas, receives much less display time than Jane, who’s given a disaster in addition to particular powers, a blond blowout and muscle tissue that inflate and deflate like occasion balloons. Jane’s new abilities don’t do a lot for the story and skim as a dutiful nod to girls’s empowerment (thanks). Portman does what she will, but she’s so tightly wound that she by no means syncs up with the loosey-goosey rhythms the way in which Thompson and Hemsworth do.

Waititi’s playfulness buoys “Love and Thunder,” however the insistence on Thor’s likability, his decency and dude-ness, has turn out to be a artistic useless finish. The film has its sights, notably Hemsworth, Thompson and Crowe, whose Zeus vamps via a sequence with a butt-naked Thor and fainting minions. It’s a pleasant and cheerfully vulgar interlude, and critically, it reminds you of the sheer otherworldliness of those beings who — with their vanities, cruelties, deeds, mysteries and powers — flip actuality into fable and tales into goals. Like film stars, gods aren’t like us, which in fact is one cause we invented them.

Thor: Love and Thunder
Rated PG-13 for superhero violence. Working time: 2 hours 5 minutes. In theaters.