THOR: LOVE AND THUNDER
The Gods Must Be Crazy
★★★ 1/2A EXTRAS ★★★ RELEASED OUT NOW! 2022 | 12 | Blu-ray (4K/standard)/ Dvd/download
Director Taika Waititi
Cast Chris Hemsworth, Natalie Portman, Tessa Thompson, Christian Bale
The return of co-writer/ director Taika Waititi to the Thor franchise had many expecting another Thor: Ragnarok, but while there are some big similarities (the winking, goofy Waititi sense of humour is in full force), the result is a little less than the sum of its parts this time. Which is not to say that Love And Thunder is bad, it just feels less focused than its predecessor, the looseness giving way to full-on slack at times.
Christian Bale makes for an effective, understandable villain as Gor, a man with a personal grudge against deities, but it’s Thor’s journey to defeat him and figure out the next stage of his life that suffers. Chris Hemsworth remains nimble as Thor, here swapping the “dad bod” for a “god bod” again.
Waititi and co-writer Jennifer Kaytin Robinson, meanwhile, get decent mileage out of the return of Natalie Portman’s Jane Foster, here battling cancer using some handy, Mjolnir-bestowed superpowers.
Yet while there are certainly good gags here, Waititi and co are so eager to cram everything in (including screaming goats and a pantheon full of new gods led by a crazily-accented Zeus, played by Russell Crowe), that some of the series’ strengths, such as Tessa Thompson’s sarcastic, funny Valkyrie are sidelined and near enough wasted.
Extras Waititi’s filmmaking might be full of subversive inventiveness, but the three main featurettes here (“Hammerworthy: Thor And The Mighty Thor”, six minutes; “Shaping A Villain”, six minutes; and “Another Classic Taika Adventure”, eight minutes) are basic examples of movie promo material: lots of praise between colleagues, shots of the director (described by Hemsworth as a “genius child”) and his cast clowning around between scenes, and the usual collection of talking heads about how it was all made.
The gag reel (three minutes) is also business as usual, while three deleted scenes (comprising eight minutes) offer a much clearer look into the editing choices of the movie – including a moment where Zeus returns when Jane is ill in hospital late in the story and is helpful, which would have changed the narrative completely.
Finally, the commentary track by Waititi (with a funny assist from his daughters) starts off sparse but becomes more humorous and insightful as it goes along. There are plenty of riffs on how costly elements of a movie like this can be and what he “ripped off” for inspiration, plus interesting nuggets such as the fact that the owl aliens are based on the gang from the original Mad Max
– something Taika got to tell George Miller when he visited the set.
Waititi decided to make the goats screech after seeing a viral video blending screaming goats with a Taylor Swift song.
The result is a little less than the sum of its parts this time