Is 'Thor: Love and Thunder' the worst MCU movie?
The Marvel machine groans and creaks along as it sacrifices consistent tone and characterisation for a quantity-over-quality comedic approach
A couple months ago, when Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness came out, I asked in the title of my review if it was the best MCU film. Realistically it may not be, although I’ve certainly enjoyed it more than most. I only mention this to say that this time, the title question has an answer: I sincerely believe that Thor: Love and Thunder is the worst film that has graced the MCU. Granted, I’ve not seen The Dark World in ages or Eternals at all, both of which are held in quite poor critical regard, but the latest entry in the God of Thunder’s saga is a pathetic and frustrating outing that claims the shameful crown of ‘worst MCU project’ with surprising ease.
Love and Thunder picks up like so many Marvel films do nowadays — after the events of Endgame, Thor (still played by the highly affable and buff Chris Hemsworth) is spelunking with the Guardians of the Galaxy as he searches for a greater purpose within his life as a hero and god. However, a new threat has arisen; Gorr the God Butcher (Christian Bale, highly underutilized by the way) is coming for all the gods in the universe, all the while Thor’s ex-girlfriend Jane (Natalie Portman) has started wielding his ex-weapon Mjolnir.
The premise itself is not inherently uninteresting. Love and Thunder actually does have themes that it’s attempting to explore about Thor and his purpose, legacy and role as a god. It’s clear that he’s lost and in pain following the defeat of Thanos and has been using that spelunking with the Guardians to basically avoid his feelings tremendous feelings of grief and loss. Yet what’s so genuinely off-putting about Love and Thunder even in comparison to other MCU films is the way that it self-destructs those feelings that Thor and other characters possess for comedy’s sake, cheapening their personal issues and trauma just to stretch a joke until a painful, unnatural conclusion, and then stretch it even further. It’s an insulting, necromantic imitation of campy 80s films that refuses to treat its audience with respect, and it’s unbelievable that a product like this could from a filmmaker who had once shown promise as great as Taika Waititi.
The dreadful feeling that had begun creeping in when Korg recounts all of Thor’s highly tragic MCU story so far interspersed with jokes only settled throughout the film’s first major action setpiece as Thor and the Guardians take down a group of terrorists on an alien planet. The stakes are exceptionally low as Thor tears through the terrorists while Welcome to the Jungle plays in an aggressively average needle drop. Furthermore, the action is highly dependent on CGI (naturally) and difficult to parse. The whole sequence seemingly only exists to remind you how cool Thor is.
Not long after saving everybody but destroying their building, Thor receives a pair of huge, screaming goats. And boy, do I sure hope you like the sounds of screaming goats, because the sound of that screaming will only play about 10 times across Love and Thunder’s first hour, a grotesque reference to the soundtrack of decade-old memes at this point. This running joke is indicative of the movie’s biggest issue. Rather than balance emotion and humour like Waititi has so effortlessly done before in works like Hunt for the Wilderpeople or even Ragnarok, Love and Thunder degrades all of its most sincere ideas by genuinely not going about a minute without an incessantly unfunny joke that vapidly references pop culture or otherwise falls into the painful system of dialogue that Marvel has constructed for all its films. The only joke in the film that I found even remotely entertaining was the brief Russel Crowe cameo as Zeus, but that has much more to do with Crowe’s self-knowingly silly performance rather than the dialogue he delivers through it.
Everything about Love and Thunder feels highly overtuned in response to positive feedback received from previous films. It seems like the only lesson Marvel learnt from Ragnarok is that people like it when Thor is funny, so they made a script that was basically devoid of any content except humour. Enough people online (me included at the time) said “gee, I love Korg!” so they thought it a brilliant idea to give him increased screentime that only allows him to make insipid “comedic” commentary about whatever is going on. Tessa Thompson’s Valkyrie is starved of any sort of character progression and is seemingly only used as token LGBTQIA+ representation in scenes that are short and distinct enough from everything else to be cut in the international markets where Disney aren’t brave enough to actually stand up for the community in a non-performative way.
Arguably, the only ‘real’ characters in the film are Thor and Jane, and even then their arcs are severely underdeveloped or undercut by the comedy in the film. Jane is revealed to have stage four cancer in an early scene filled with quips and jokes that honestly left my stomach churning considering the depiction of chemotherapy contrasted with grating attempts at comedy. Later, Gorr kidnaps a bunch of kids from New Asgard on Earth and immediately after, the comedy relief playwrights of the town ask if they should get to work on a play of the events of the previous night. Forty children just got kidnapped, essentially setting up the main stakes of the story, and rather than focus on the actual implications of that threat the film just decides to make another joke?
Even when Thor is trying to keep everyone’s spirits in a moment of unity, Waititi and crew seemingly can’t resist completely short-selling the moment by smothering the somber atmosphere with jokes about squeaky whiteboards and building damage. Love and Thunder’s apparent disdain for tonal balance and consistency only makes it all the more absurd when it does actually try to make you feel something in any given scene. The third act is probably the best part of the film as it more consistently balances these clashing vibes (though still poorly), but it’s too little too late by that point.
Similarly overtuned is the overall approach to visual design, effects and filmmaking. Many of the costumes here are just straight up awful. Thor’s blue, gold and red outfit is littered with too much geometry that makes it a genuine eyesore. Marvel’s recent trademark of “rely a disgusting amount on overworking underpaid VFX artists” is just as present here, as many computer-generated moments here look seriously awful; I swear Korg’s lips basically never match with his dialogue! Furthermore, the action is bordering on the illegible with rapid cuts and no sense of space, to the point where I’m convinced that there’s no actual choreography when the scenes are being “filmed” and they literally just do it all with computer models. Multiverse of Madness’s script might have been its weakest link, but it at least had fun sequences to boot. Love and Thunder insists on making all of its scenes look as bland and inoffensive as possible.
Perhaps my sole area of praise for the film comes in the performances of Bale and Hemsworth, who are attempting completely different things but nonetheless try their hardest with the unrelentingly average material they’re expected to work with. Bale is a no-brainer performance wise, and even if Gorr lacks a lot of significant depth and even villainy on-screen, his unnatural mannerisms and solid vocal performance cut through even the least good moments of the script. Hemsworth also does what he can with the script, committing 110% to delivering every painful joke to a level that I can’t help but admire for its sheer dedication.
But despite that dedication to comedy, I only ever laughed at Thor: Love and Thunder rather than with it, a movie that ends up a grotesque mutation of both Marvel and Waititi’s past works. This was a very bad effort by pretty much every party involved, and it’s shameful that this film got through so many stages of production with clearly so little thought or care even considered for it. Please wait for this one to hit Disney+, because I can guarantee it’s not worth your money or Love and Thunder’s success — but sadly, I’m sure it’ll do fine anyway.
3/10
