Christian Bale is giving a genuinely frightening performance as a man who has decided every god deserves to die, and he’s doing it in a film that keeps cutting away to screaming goats.
Two and a half out of five. It’s okay. Nothing amazing, and the gap between what’s in it and what it does with what’s in it is the whole problem.
The good bit: the weapons are jealous of each other
My favourite thing in the film, easily.
Mjolnir and Stormbreaker are both treated as sentient, and both are quietly resentful of the other. The axe sulks. The hammer has moved on to somebody new. Thor is stuck managing a relationship between two lumps of enchanted metal, and the film plays it completely straight-faced.
That’s quite funny and genuinely enjoyable, and it’s the kind of specific, silly idea that Ragnarok was full of. There are some good action sequences too, and a few real surprises. The film is not without pleasures.
Gorr deserved a much better film
Bale is excellent. The opening, with a man in a desert who has lost his daughter and then meets the god he’d been praying to and finds him indifferent, is the strongest material in any Thor film.
And the Necrosword sequences work. The way he moves through shadow, the way the weapon corrupts him while making him effective, all of that lands.
Where it stops working for me is the logic. Theoretically, any of these gods should be able to deal with one man, sword or no sword. If nothing else, they could simply leave. Fly away, don’t engage, don’t give him the opportunity to get within range. The film needs them to stand still and be killed, so they stand still and are killed.
That’s a big ask. I can live with it because the story it enables is decent, and I noticed it every time.
Zeus is the film’s worst decision
The whole sequence in his court, with the assembled gods watching, is pretty bad. Nothing great about any of it.
Zeus is played entirely as a comedy character, which would be a defensible choice in isolation. The problem is what it does by comparison. Think about Odin across the previous films, and the gravitas that brought. A serious actor, playing a king with genuine weight, whose presence made Asgard feel like it mattered.
Here you have another very good actor handed the king of the Greek gods, and the film uses him for a joke about a toga coming off. It’s a misuse, and it drags Thor down with it. He gets stripped in front of a laughing crowd, and the scene exists so the audience can laugh at him too.
That’s the film’s real failure. Ragnarok made Thor funny while keeping him formidable. This one makes him the butt of it.
Jane, and the version I’d rather have seen
Jane taking up the hammer is comic accurate, and I know that, and I was still a little disappointed.
Natalie Portman is fine and the cancer storyline has real weight buried in it. The tone keeps undercutting that weight, which is a shame, because a film that sat with it properly would have been more interesting than this one.
What I’d have preferred is the other version from the comics: the one where someone genuinely out-fights Thor, beats him, and earns the hammer that way. Beta Ray Bill, who is a much stranger and more interesting proposition than a returning love interest, and who would have given the film an actual contest at its centre. That character has always struck me as more interesting, and it would have been quite cool to see.
The ending is a cop-out
I didn’t really get the daughter thing, and I wasn’t a fan of where it leaves us.
Thor ends up raising Love, Gorr’s resurrected daughter, and I have no idea whether she’ll ever appear again. It’s presented as an emotional resolution to a film that hasn’t earned one.
Worse is the sequence where Thor hands power to a group of children so they can fight. It felt lame. Everybody becomes a god, everyone gets a weapon, everyone joins in. It’s the superhero equivalent of everyone becoming Shazam, or the end of Buffy where every potential Slayer everywhere is activated at once. That worked there because seven seasons had built to it. Here it’s a scene that arrives to solve a fight.
Power should cost something. Giving it away by the handful at the end drains it.
The comedy problem
Ragnarok worked because the jokes sat on top of genuine loss. Thor lost his hammer, his eye, his father and his planet in that film, and the comedy was how he coped.
Here there’s no equivalent weight underneath. Endgame left him in a bad place, and rather than deal with that, this film opens by having him work out with the Guardians in a montage and moves on. The register that saved the character is now the character’s entire personality, and there’s nothing left for it to sit on top of.
Whether that tips over into parody is a fair question. There are stretches where I think it does.
Where it lands
Two and a half. Some good action, a few good surprises, one great performance and one great gag about jealous weapons.
Against Infinity War, where Stormbreaker actually meant something, this feels weightless. Against Ragnarok, which it’s directly sequelising, it’s a considerable step down, and I’d say the problem is that it mistook the tone for the point.
The mid-credits scene introduces Hercules with a lot of ceremony, and given how many of these stingers have gone nowhere lately, I’m not holding my breath.
