‘Thor: Love and Thunder’ Review: Chris Hemsworth and Natalie Portman in a Sequel That Proves the Fluky Fun of Taika Waititi’s ‘Thor: Ragnarok’ Was No Fluke
05.07.2022 - 16:47
/ variety.com
Owen Gleiberman Chief Film Critic“Thor: Love and Thunder” has a pleasing, let’s-try-it-on-and-shoot-the-works effervescence. Like most Marvel movies, the fourth entry in the Thor saga would seem to have weighty matters on its mind, starting with Thor’s hammer, the smashed fragments of which have been reassembled — and, more to the point, claimed — by Jane Foster (Natalie Portman), Thor’s old flame. By possessing the mystique of that hammer, she has become the Mighty Thor.
Not a superhero like Thor. She now is Thor — which, you’d imagine, might not sit so well with the God of Thunder himself. Absent of hammer, he wields an enchanted ax called Stormbreaker, but sorry, it’s just not the same thing.Yet given that he hasn’t seen Jane since “Thor: The Dark World” (according to our hero, it has been eight years, seven months, and six days), and that he’d do anything to win her back, Thor is pretty good about playing the chivalrous supportive male and honoring the fact that she now possesses his brand.
There’s some screwball sniping between the two of them, all of it charged and sexy and entertaining. And it’s not like they’re adversaries. They join up with the warrior teammates Thor met in “Thor: Ragnarok,” all to defeat Gorr the God Butcher (Christian Bale), a scarred super-killer who’s on a vengeful mission to destroy every god in the universe.
In other words, a standard day in the MCU.But “Thor: Love and Thunder” is far from standard, and that’s a good thing. Like “Thor: Ragnarok,” the movie was directed and co-written by Taika Waititi, the New Zealand sleight-of-hand-prankster-who-is-also-a-serious-filmmaker, and it builds on the earlier film’s highly winning tone of skewed flippancy. But it also, like “Ragnarok,”
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