Thor: Love and Thunder Review

The material was all there. Christian Bale plays Gorr as a bereaved father with a chalk white face and a blade that eats gods, and his opening scene, a man burying a child in a desert and then meeting the deity who does not care, is the strongest cold open the studio has ever filmed. The shadow realm sequence, shot in high contrast monochrome with color bleeding only from the weapons, is the best image of the phase. Natalie Portman returns with a story about terminal illness and a hammer that is quietly killing her.

All of it is thrown away. Waititi's improvisational method, which gave Ragnarok its looseness, here produces a film where every scene stops dead for an unshaped riff, where a grief plot is interrupted by shrieking goats, and where the god of thunder is a punchline in his own picture. Russell Crowe's Zeus is a sustained comic misfire nobody cut. The romance is asserted through montage rather than written. Tessa Thompson is stranded. Two great performances and no discipline whatsoever, and easily the franchise's most frustrating waste.