Review of Thor: Love and Thunder (2022) by Moviemitch96 — 08 Jul 2022

I'm this fourth solo outing for the God of Thunder, Thor (Chris Hemsworth) joins forces with his old lover Jane Foster (Natalie Portman), who has now taken on the hammer of Mighty Thor, and King Valkyrie (Tessa Thompson) in order to defeat a new dark and sinister evil known as Gorr the God Butcher (Christian Bale).

In total honesty, gone are the days where I'd become excited and overjoyed for the newest MCU film. In my eyes, the MCU's golden age ended with 'Avengers: Endgame' and it just hasn't been the same since.

For the most part, we've been plagued with films that simply feel like obvious afterthoughts or expertly-written epilogue fanfiction at best, and this one is no exception. Riddled with an absurd amount of corny moments including but not limited to flying/screeching Taylor Swift goats, Thor riding his Stormbreaker axe like a witch on a broomstick, Thor caught in a jealousy love triangle with his old hammer MjoInir and his Stormbreaker axe and talking to them quite often throughout the film, random accents galore (Valkyrie now suddenly has a British accent and Russell Crowe's Zeus's accent is beyond silly, all over the place, and impossible to pinpoint), etc.

The list goes on and on. Not even the performances can really save this one, as Hemsworth remains charming yet goofy to a fault in this one, and Bale's Gorr simply loooked and felt like a Voldemort ripoff.

For me, the film's biggest standout star was Portman's Mighty Thor. Watching her carry the hammer and kicking ass was incredibly fun and satisfying to watch. The Guardians of the Galaxy also make a brief appearance at the beginning of the film that felt fun but mostly rushed and wasted unfortunately.

Like I said before, the story and writing simply feels like fanfiction material at this point in the MCU and the stakes and emotions never feel as high anymore. So overall, while it's big, bright, and does have its fair share of enjoyable action sequences and a solid action performance from Portman in particular, this 'Thor' still feels like too much of a burnout like the rest of Phase 4 of the MCU has felt so far for the most part and is simply just a jumbled and corny mess.