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Thor: Love and Thunder

This fourth Thor film suffers from the old cake adage - yep, too many cakes spoil the broth. While Ragnarok rode its zaniness to the limit, it pretty much relied on that alone to get it over the line. And all the better for it. Love and Thunder attempts to lob a few more tones into the arrangement and it all gets a tad discordant. The loopy stuff is still there but Taika Waititi has added a despair and grief strand of cancer, some loneliness, a splash of familial love, and rinsed it all with existential journeys (both hero and villain). It doesn't mix all that well, very much like my metaphors.

Christian Bale, as the villain of the piece, unpacks his Sunday best and gives it full welly, and the litany of Marvel villains that engender sympathy (I'm thinking Killmonger and, of course, Thanos) is burnished here with his Gorr the God Butcher. Once again though, and understandably I guess, they have him vanquished. At least the choice given to him - revenge or love - was better than 'Just don't do it, man, we must protect our gods'. Even having Thor 'kill' another god showed there's maybe some room for nuance with Waititi. Just not enough.

There were a couple of moments that raised the film, most notably Russell Crowe channelling Con the Fruiterer in his Zeus role (see below). He's having more fun here than anyone in a Marvel film since Goldblum in Ragnarok. There are some old film references that are nice - the child-catcher's cage from Chitty Chitty Bang Bang is cool and the (actual) ship crashing into a planet hints at George Méliès' A Trip to the Moon (bare-faced theft from Dave at the Cinemile here). Natalie Portman and Tessa Thompson are great but watching this made me want to see them in something better.

Sadly, the low points in Love and Thunder outweigh the high. The Korg (Waititi) exposition narration was trite and not as funny as it wanted to be, the super-powered kids segment was too cutesy for anyone's good, there was WAY TOO MUCH Guns and Roses shite (one chord from them is too much), and crucially, Thor's dopey shtick is getting tiresome. Maybe four standalone films for one character is a bridge too far?

See also:

This is a transparent excuse to mention excellent films featuring the two best actors in Love and Thunder. Bale is horrifically great in Brad Anderson's The Machinist (2004), and Crowe is brilliant in Jocelyn Moorhouse's Proof (1991).

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