Thor: Love and Thunder (2022) review

Marvel movies are a particular type of bad for me. They’re the embodiment of the corporate factory-like moviemaking that has been growing in the Hollywood system over the last few decades, and the Marvel Cinematic Universe has been particularly effective at churning out watchable, accessible, unchallenging, mass-appealing movies that make a billion dollars apiece like a conveyor belt and crush any other movie financially that dares to come out in the weeks surrounding their release date.

Despite having grown out of Marvel long before 2019, Avengers: Endgame was where I saw the natural conclusion of ANY type of storytelling integrity that Marvel had going for it. I watched it, thought “that was a decent ending to this franchise, good on them!” and never wanted another Marvel Cinematic Universe movie ever again. But unfortunately, the money train just had to keep rolling, and I said goodbye to the Marvel Cinematic Universe despite new movies being churned out.

Now it’s 2022. Four Marvel movies came out last year. FOUR! I watched Spider-Man: No Way Home, and it was about as good as I expected (decent). I watched Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness, which I was able to view more as a bit of a watered-down Sam Raimi movie than an MCU movie, so I had fun with that. The rest since Endgame I haven’t bothered with at all, and I watched this solely due to the universally negative response it was getting.

Wow! It’s worse and more embarrassing than Morbius! Where that was in the pathetic category of bad movie, Thor: Love and Thunder is genuinely so fucking annoying! This is easily the worst MCU movie since The Incredible Hulk. (I haven’t watched Black Widow, The Eternals or Captain Marvel and I won’t)

Something about Taika Waititi brings out all of the worst aspects of the MCU for me. Everything I dislike about these movies is on display at its fullest; the nonstop try-hard cringe humor, the flat visual style, boilerplate plot, inability to create any tension or real emotion other than attempts at comedy, a complete lack of any sort of theme more compelling than the importance of love, teamwork and family, it’s all here and cranked up to the max.

It’s a real shame because Gorr the God Butcher in theory could be a great villain, or if they were really daring, an even better protagonist. Christian Bale does a good job, and the backstory behind him is reminiscent of myths and ancient folklore which was really intriguing to me, but he’s mostly reduced to just another one-off Marvel villain. The scene in the weird black and white realm is probably the most visually interesting a Marvel movie has been since who knows when. I just really wish it was tackled in a real movie and not in Marvel product #2747291. The amount of wasted potential with that character and story is really depressing to me.

One of the many things wrong about Love and Thunder is its conflict, and how it doesn't do much with the philosophical question it (likely unintentionally) raises. Gorr the God Butcher was a devout man who was left to die by the gods and goes on a crusade to wipe out every single one after seeing that they are all frauds. And he is right. All the movie does is show that Gorr is totally correct in doing this. The gods at Omnipotent City, and Thor, are shown to be nothing more than self absorbed, buffoonish dolts who are too incompetent and selfish to hold the power they wield. So why should we be rooting against Gorr to wipe them all out?

Usually, a movie will make the point that the villain is in the wrong. Sometimes, a movie will allow the villain to be in the right, and force the heroes to grapple with that. Love and Thunder however, does neither. Despite making the case that Gorr is correct in the first two acts of the film, possibly forcing Thor to rethink his position as the God of Thunder, the writers decide to abandon the only possibly interesting thing this movie could do in favor of talking about how love always wins. It cops out and pretends like it didn't explicitly make the case that Gorr was correct for the first hour. It's the most weak, limp, "love is the strongest force in the universe," liberal-theory ass way this movie could have resolved.

Putting that aside, the real problem is that there are not enough words in the English language to express how unbearably fucking annoying nearly every moment of this movie is. Thor: Love and Thunder is a comedy even more so than most Marvel movies and holy shit the humor in this is reminiscent of the bad comedy in The Last Jedi, but at least that movie has other things going for it other than terrible attempts at jokes. I know that this is a movie for babies and children but that’s not an excuse to make an annoying movie, I’m sorry it just isn’t. The jokes were not only never funny, but they were all so not-clever that I could tell what nearly every single joke was going to be before the joke happened. And sure comedy is subjective but if you find this funny you have a low IQ I don’t know what else to say.

The dialogue serves no purpose other than delivering the nonstop quips and jokes, and none of the verbal jokes landed for me. Every exchange between characters feels like watching a bad improv group. The running joke about the magical screaming goats that made me want to throw my laptop (proud to have pirated this one). Every single joke was the typical broad, try-hard quirky “lol so random” humor that Taika Waititi inserts into his MCU projects, feeling more akin to a two-hour-long SNL skit than a superhero movie. It was grading in Ragnarok and it’s like nails on a chalkboard in Love and Thunder.

In my Shaun of the Dead review I talked about how in comedies I typically ask myself “if its not funny, what does it have to offer?” Thor: Love and Thunder is not funny, and it has absolutely nothing else of substance to offer. The action is terrible, so it fails as an action movie. The plot and story is middling, so it fails as a fun space adventure/superhero movie. The character writing is hackneyed, so it fails as a movie about characters. The themes are slapped on at the end for an unearned attempt at an emotional payoff, so it fails to be about anything at all. Christian Bale as Gorr the God Butcher is the only thing I can almost say I like about this movie, but even that comes with an asterisk. I guess it’s shorter than most Marvel movies these days. And that I didn’t pay the price of admission to see it.