{"id":1548536,"date":"2022-07-11T11:04:19","date_gmt":"2022-07-11T15:04:19","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/?p=1548536"},"modified":"2022-07-11T11:04:23","modified_gmt":"2022-07-11T15:04:23","slug":"review-thor-love-and-thunder","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/review-thor-love-and-thunder\/","title":{"rendered":"REVIEW: \u2018Thor: Love and Thunder\u2019"},"content":{"rendered":"<aside class=\"mashsb-container mashsb-main mashsb-stretched\"><div class=\"mashsb-box\"><div class=\"mashsb-count mash-medium\" style=\"&quot;\"><div class=\"counts mashsbcount\">10<\/div><span class=\"mashsb-sharetext\">SHARES<\/span><\/div><div class=\"mashsb-buttons\"><a class=\"mashicon-facebook mash-medium mash-nomargin mashsb-noshadow\" href=\"https:\/\/www.facebook.com\/sharer.php?u=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.conservativenewsdaily.net%2Fbreaking-news%2Freview-thor-love-and-thunder%2F\" target=\"_top\" rel=\"nofollow\"><span class=\"icon\"><\/span><span class=\"text\">Facebook<\/span><\/a><a class=\"mashicon-twitter mash-medium mash-nomargin mashsb-noshadow\" href=\"https:\/\/twitter.com\/intent\/tweet?text=&amp;url=https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/?p=1548536&amp;via=ConservNewsDly\" target=\"_top\" rel=\"nofollow\"><span class=\"icon\"><\/span><span class=\"text\">Twitter<\/span><\/a><a class=\"mashicon-subscribe mash-medium mash-nomargin mashsb-noshadow\" href=\"#\" target=\"_top\" rel=\"nofollow\"><span class=\"icon\"><\/span><span class=\"text\">Subscribe<\/span><\/a><div class=\"onoffswitch2 mash-medium mashsb-noshadow\" style=\"display:none\"><\/div><\/div>\n            <\/div>\n                <div style=\"clear:both\"><\/div><\/aside>\n            <!-- Share buttons by mashshare.net - Version: 4.0.47--><div><\/div>\n<p>When it\u2019s really on fire, <em>Thor: Love and Thunder<\/em> is a wondrous work of sustained, exhilarating silliness. Now, it\u2019s not as silly or as exhilarating as its glorious predecessor, <em>Thor: Ragnarok<\/em>, which is to comic superhero movies what <em>Singin\u2019 in the Rain<\/em> is to musicals. But it\u2019s pretty damn good, all things considered. Co-writer\/director Taika Waititi, who made <em>Ragnarok<\/em> as well as <em>Jojo Rabbit<\/em> and is probably the most energetic and singular creative force working in popular culture right now, stuffs the new movie with jokes, asides, slapstick, visual puns, and as many comic references to cultural icons as a Bugs Bunny cartoon.<\/p>\n<p>The inspired Hemsworth has now completed the about-face that began with <em>Ragnarok<\/em> and continued in the final <em>Avengers<\/em> movies, turning Thor from an earnest man-mountain into Buzz Lightyear with a hammer\u2014noble and fearless and vain and comically clueless all at the same time. (I mean the funny Buzz Lightyear from the <em>Toy Story<\/em> movies, not the bad, not-funny one in <em>Lightyear<\/em>.) Hemsworth even pulls off a series of bits about Thor\u2019s complicated emotional relationship with the weapon he made for himself in <em>Avengers: Endgame<\/em>, the Stormbreaker, and each hits the bullseye. Some of Waititi\u2019s fanciful japes don\u2019t work, but it doesn\u2019t matter, because there\u2019s always another one about to come in from the wings.<\/p>\n<p>As this is a Marvel thing, there has to be a plot about a villain who is on a quest to destroy things and take over everything. This time it\u2019s Christian Bale, whose makeup is, bizarrely, an almost exact likeness of Jared Leto\u2019s getup when he played the Joker in the dreadful 2016 DC movie <em>Suicide Squad<\/em>. (I\u2019m not talking about <em>The Suicide Squad<\/em>. I\u2019m talking about <em>Suicide Squad<\/em>. These are two different movies. Made five years apart. I\u2019m not kidding.)<\/p>\n<p>What Christian Bale\u2019s character wants to do is kill gods. In the world of <em>Thor: Love and Thunder<\/em>, all the gods from every ethnic and religious pagan tradition are alive and well and hanging out with each other in a place called Omnipotent City. And you know what? Bale is right. The gods kind of deserve to die. They\u2019re selfish and thoughtless and mean, and in the case of Zeus, act like the grouchy proprietor of a successful Greek diner in New Jersey when you object that your coffee is cold.<\/p>\n<p>Zeus is here played by an unrecognizable Russell Crowe, who not only does a flawless Greek-diner accent but is so hilarious it breaks your heart to think of all the romantic comedies he might have made back when he was young and handsome and before everyone discovered he was actually a complete violent lunatic who threw phones at people\u2019s heads and thereby trashed his own career. His five minutes on screen are alone worth the price of admission.<\/p>\n<p>Thor comes to hate Zeus and kind of goes all Bale on him. The movie\u2019s confusing take on godshood is its great weakness; if the gods stink then why should Thor risk everything to save them? Waititi contrives to turn Bale\u2019s character into the Child Catcher from the horrible 1968 extrava-bore <em>Chitty Chitty Bang Bang<\/em>. (I\u2019m sure this is intentional.) He steals a bunch of kids who are so multicultural they come from different planets, even, and puts them in a cage in an alternate dimension. He then visits them and scares them for no good reason. We saw in the movie\u2019s opening sequence that Bale has become a god slayer because a god didn\u2019t save his own young daughter, who died of thirst in a desert. So what\u2019s he tormenting these kids for? He\u2019s only kidnapped them to lure Thor to his realm because he needs Thor\u2019s weapon, Stormbreaker.<\/p>\n<p>Why does he need Stormbreaker? Does it matter?<\/p>\n<p>The movie centers on Thor\u2019s busted relationship with his ex-girlfriend Jane, who somehow also becomes Thor even though Thor is still Thor. When last Natalie Portman played Jane, in <em>Thor: The Dark World<\/em> (the third-worst of all Marvel movies, the worst being <em>Iron Man 2<\/em> and the second-worst being <em>Eternals<\/em>), she walked through it in a fury because the Marvel people fired the director she had wanted. Portman was probably right\u2014the director in question was Patty Jenkins, who went on to make the smash hit <em>Wonder Woman<\/em>\u2014but she evidently vowed she wouldn\u2019t deign to do any more Marvel stuff.\u00a0 She had also won an Oscar between the original <em>Thor<\/em> and <em>Thor: The Dark World<\/em> and got a little big for her britches, if you ask me, given that she has done negligible work in the decade since.<\/p>\n<p>And she does negligible work here too. Portman is supposed to bring a level of emotional honesty and delicacy to the wild proceedings, but she seems completely out of place and cannot find a center or a tone for her role. She and Hemsworth actually had a good rhythm going in the original <em>Thor<\/em> but his transformation into a wacky comic character doesn\u2019t give her much to play against. And her character\u2019s transformation into a superhero is (I can hardly believe I\u2019m typing these words) not credible.<\/p>\n<p>The thing about crazy comedies is that their plots are often disastrous and there are stretches of boring pointlessness. But over time, you forget those and you only remember the highs. My guess is that while <em>Love and Thunder<\/em> will always be overshadowed by <em>Ragnarok<\/em>, it is a movie people will recall with fondness and will come to seem a classic a decade hence.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>When it\u2019s really on fire, Thor: Love and Thunder is a wondrous work of sustained, exhilarating silliness. Now, it\u2019s not as silly or as exhilarating as its glorious predecessor, Thor:<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":87,"featured_media":2315279,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_mo_disable_npp":"","fifu_image_url":"","fifu_image_alt":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1548536","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1548536","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/87"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1548536"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1548536\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/2315279"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1548536"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1548536"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1548536"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}