Thor: The Dark World Review

The single interesting idea here is Loki in a cell, and the film seems to know it. Hiddleston gets one great scene, an illusion dropping away to show a man who has just lost his mother and does not want to be seen losing anything, and Alan Taylor shoots the funeral procession, lantern boats drifting on dark water, as the one image worth keeping. Everything else is machinery. The Aether is a plot coupon that turns Natalie Portman into a container for most of the runtime, Christopher Eccleston is a fine actor rendered inert under latex and subtitles, and the villain's stated goal, returning the universe to darkness, reads like a placeholder nobody bothered to replace.

The London finale at least attempts something, cutting portals into the fight so the combatants keep falling out of one continent and into another, and the gag about the hammer arriving late is the only wit in the third act. Kat Dennings is asked to supply comedy in a film with no room for any. Competently made and almost entirely purposeless, this is the entry the next film would spend its runtime mocking.