Sometimes, you just can't escape the shadow of your predecessors. Such is the problem facing Thor: Love and Thunder, which serves as writer/director Taika Waititi's much-anticipated follow-up to his 2017 film Thor: Ragnarok (this go-around, he wrote the script with Jennifer Kaytin Robinson). Ragnarok was so much fun, so tightly written, and so good at balancing the silly with more introspective material, it would always be difficult to follow that film up. Even if Love and Thunder weren't constantly reminding you of that superior movie, it would still have some noticeable shortcomings. Ironically, an issue of weightlessness keeps bringing this project down to Earth like an anchor. Thankfully, some of Waititi's greatest assets as a filmmaker are still here to make the proceedings largely enjoyable.
Picking up shortly after Avengers: Endgame, Thor (Chris Hemsworth) is struggling to find himself and specifically what his purpose should be now. At the same time, Thor's ex-lover Jane Foster (Natalie Portman) has come into possession of that mystical hammer Mjolnir. Wielding this weapon, she's now become The Mighty Thor, a formidable superhero in her own right. The two Thor's are gonna have to work together to stop Gorr the God Butcher (Christian Bale). He's using a fancy sword known as the Necromancer to slaughter every single God in existence. Grab your gear and the fierce warrior Valkyrie (Tessa Thompson), because it's time for another Thor adventure.
Waititi thankfully maintains Ragnarok's love for unabashedly silly cosmic mayhem, with nary a desire in sight to ground things in reality or handwave away something as just being futuristic science. Shadow beasts hunt down children in the night, a big bug can wear clothes, and a big city that's home to many Gods (including Russell Crowe's Zeus) can have a bunch of peculiar-looking weirdoes that the camera treats as totally normal. The status quo in Love and Thunder is absurdism and it often conjures up memories of 1980s Jim Henson movies like The Dark Crystal or Labyrinth in its love for ridiculous fantasy storytelling.
Much like The Dark Crystal, though, Love and Thunder is often more fun in pieces than as a whole. Part of this comes down to the characters not being as concretely-defined as they could be. Major pieces of information in the backstories of Thor and Jane are breezed past in flashbacks and montages suffocated in narration by Korg (Taika Waititi). That's especially problematic since Thor's starting issue (he has trouble letting other people in) doesn't align with what we've seen of him in prior Marvel Cinematic Universe movies. He's always been a gregarious soul, so it's weird that we're starting out with the premise of him being somebody who keeps people at arm's length. We're also only just now getting to know anything about Foster and information about her personal life would've made more of an impact if it could've had room to breathe. Thor: Love and Thunder knows what emotional and character beats it wants to hit, but its comedic impulses keep intruding on those ambitions.
Waititi's script's love for the inexplicable is better suited to random comedic asides than in the more dramatic sequences. In the latter scenarios, it can often feel like the screenplay is just coming up with random new MacGuffin's or aspects of Marvel Comics cosmic lore to keep things moving rather than finding new entertaining places to take these characters. Just playing with the toys Love and Thunder establishes from the get-go rather than trying to find new shiny objects at every turn would've help the dramatic beats feel more organic.
On the positive side, Waititi's exploration of the weightier concepts do land some emotionally potent moments, particularly anything that has to do with Christian Bale's ruthless Gorr. Despite Love and Thunder suffering from a sense of weightlessness, some of the introspective details related to figuring out what defines a good worthy life do hit the mark. Waititi's balance between the silly and the poignant isn't as strong as it was on Hunt for the Wilderpeople, but his willingness to let the Gorr-centric sequences of this film have a gravitas that isn't interrupted by gags ensures that there's still some emotional heft here.
Much of that heft comes from the performance of Bale, who lends a palpably fervent aura to Gorr's quest for slaughter. There's a cracked quality to Gorr, he just seems like someone whose very gait suggests he's somebody missing a critical part of his emotional capacity. A sequence that limits the scope just to Gorr antagonizing our three lead heroes is a highlight of the entire film while the practical makeup work used to realize this villain is spectacular-looking. Put simply, Bale's great here. Not being beholden to replicating the behaviors of someone from real life (like his Dick Cheney in Vice) allows Bale to remind viewers that he's just as good at conjuring up original performances wholesale as he is at mimicry.
Save for the clumsy incorporation of CG sets and creatures (the Marvel Cinematic Universe visual effects pipeline strikes again), Thor: Love and Thunder largely looks as good as Gorr's makeup. The practical sets are a lot of fun, especially ones used to realize the lavish land Zeus and other Gods call home. Not only does Gorr get the best performance and tone of the whole movie, but he's also the center of the best-looking sequences of the entire feature, particularly a duel in his monochromatic world. Even with this standout black-and-white sequence, color is, thankfully, still in high supply for Waititi's vision of the cosmos and informs lots of the fun eye candy in Love and Thunder.
Even if the gags are never quite as fresh as they are in Thor: Ragnarok (the jokes building off fan-favorite moments from Ragnarok especially feel lacking), Thor: Love and Thunder delivers plenty of jokes that still made me cackle. Chris Hemsworth is such fun playing a himbo, it's such a shame that it took so many movies for them to figure out that this is the best mold for the Marvel Cinematic Universe version of Thor to inhabit. With Hemsworth still a hoot, Thor: Love and Thunder manages to be quite funny, features an enjoyable villain, and it all looks like a million bucks. Unfortunately, it's also a disjointed venture, sometimes heavily so, that offers up too many callbacks to a superior predecessor and is too weightless to hit its lofty thematic ambitions. The shadow of Ragnarok looms large over Love and Thunder and this new installment is never strong enough as a standalone outing to escape it.
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