Thor: Love and Thunder

I went into the movie very hesitant. I'd seen the reviews. But I also had friends who loved it. I was willing to give it a chance. As I watched it, I thought "well, this isn't as bad as the reviews say". But as I sat with the movie during and after ... Yeah, it deserves that 66% on RT. This is a misfire. Not the catastrophic train wreck some people are saying, but there are problems. Systemic, deeply rooted problems. For starters, the CGI is terrible. This is the worst it's looked EVER in a Marvel movie. I'm not kidding here, Iron Man is more convincing than this, and that movie is 14 years old. The days of seamless integration between computer graphics and real life are gone, and in its place are garish CGI turds that stick out like early green screen technology. Korg, the goats, the bird warriors at the beginning, all of it, it's just so poorly done. Thor himself has suffered a character reset. Any growth or maturity he showed through the events of Ragnarok and the Infinity War/Endgame movies is wiped away so we can have dude-bro Thor again. Is he funny sometimes? Sure. Do they provide an in-universe explanation for being childish, immature, and sometimes downright stupid? Sure. But that doesn't make it the right thing to do. It was like Taika Watiti wanted a certain characterization and worked backwards to make it happen, instead of picking up where Thor was by the time Endgame wrapped up. And that goes for Thor's tenure with the Guardians Of The Galaxy; all the promise and interesting things that could've been done with that combo is brushed aside, making their paring at the end of Endgame seem pointless. Then there's the humor. It's not the overwhelming tidal wave like some hyperbolic reviewers have stated. But I will say that it is often misplaced. There's a scene where Thor is contacted by Heimdall's son using the astral vision power his dad had. He and the other children of Asgard have been kidnapped by the big bad. So what does Thor do? Get into an argument with the kid about his name (his name is Astrid, but he wants to go by Axl). NOT THE TIME FOR A JOKE. This happens often in the movie, where a serious moment or a moment where the plot should be moving forward is destroyed because a joke has been crow-barred into the scene. Ragnarok knew when to let the dramatic moments play out, and it knew when to put a stop to a joke that had run its course; Love & Thunder does not. It indulges every joke well past the point where laughter faded, and takes multiple opportunities to turn everybody -- up to and including Jane Foster, who is dying of cancer -- into a buffoon. Again, it's not all the time, but when it happens, it sends the movie crashing into a brick wall. There's a lot of little things I could also mention -- using Melissa McCarthy to get in a burn at Hela by casting her as a fat, awkward, shrill Hela in a stage production feels cheap and mean-spirited to the actress, or the narration by Korg that feels tacked on because they couldn't frame the movie, the repetition of the screaming goat gag -- but the biggest sin of this movie is its total misuse of Christian Bale's Gorr The God-Butcher. Gorr is the most compelling villain the MCU has had since Killmonger, and maybe even better. He is a man of faith and devotion who loses his daughter and yet continues to serve unflinchingly, only to be told by the god he worships that his faith and devotion are meaningless, his daughter's death and his own impending death will result in nothing but death, and that the god will just find new followers, because that's what they do. Gorr manages to kill the god, and vows to kill every god in the universe. That is a fascinating bedrock on which to build a villain; a man driven by broken faith and loss to avenge his daughter's name and his wounded pride. There's so much to explore there. So Gorr gets, like, five minutes of screen time outside of fights, and the majority of that is the prologue. Bale acts his ass off in this, and every scene where he has dialogue, where he can show Gorr's betrayed faith and devastation at a life wasted in servitude of a disinterested deity, and the sense of loss that his daughter and everyone he knew died for nothing, is marvelous ... and it gets almost no screen time whatsoever, because WE GOTTA DO THE SCREAMING GOAT JOKE AGAIN. It's so maddening. I've spent a lot of time harping on this movie, and you may be looking at the *** rating and think "is there anything he LIKES?". Yes. I think, for the first and only time, they nailed the chemistry between Jane and Thor. I love how they still have unresolved feelings, and both of them have regrets over it. For the first and only time, they feel good together. Some of the humor does land. Natalie Portman -- an actress I find wildly overrated -- does a fantastic job selling the hurt and confusion and desperation of a person too young to die but condemned to do so anyway, and she also kicks ass as Mighty Thor (got the name right!). The interplay between Jane Foster and Valkyrie is delightful. And when Thor acts like a grown-up instead of a cool idiot, it can be very touching, especially everything in the final act., And even though the movie has flaws, I never felt the need to check the time; the movie moves by at a good pace. But ... this is just not the movie Phase 4 needed. It has been an inexorable downward slide since Phase 4 began. This movie does not redeem it in quality, nor does it even offer up any connection or forward progression to any kind of over-arching narrative. It's fine, it happens, and it's over. I guess I should be grateful it didn't bog us down with more multiverse pap, or drop teasers to something bigger that just doesn't seem to want to coalesce ... but it also feels inconsequential. Ragnarok set a high bar. Love & Thunder makes no attempt to reach it, and while I can appreciate not trying to be more than it is, I also have a hard time appreciating it settling for mediocrity.