Taika Waititi’s second turn directing an adventure for Marvel’s trademarked version of the Norse God of Thunder feels like a streamlined Cliffs Notes version of itself — this is a film I absolutely believe has a rough Director’s Cut featuring at least an extra hour sitting on a hard disk somewhere. But the version released to theaters is perfectly enjoyable, charming, and hits all the beats it needs to tell its tale. Chris Hemsworth‘s Thor is still, in the wake of the grand AVENGERS finale, hanging out with the Guardians of the Galaxy, when alerts from all across said galaxy start ringing out that someone is killing all the gods. That someone is Gorr the God-Butcher (a manically grinning Christian Bale), a man whose god turned out to be an asshole, therefore once he was empowered to do so he started killing gods. Upon discovering that Asgard is Gorr’s next stop, Thor and his pal Korg (director Waititi) zip down to Earth to stop him, only to discover — wait, Jane Foster (Natalie Portman) now ALSO has the Power of Thor?! Yes, bless Taika Waititi for bringing her back to do a riff on that four-ish year stretch of Jason Aaron’s long run writing THOR comics; Jane is wielding a reconstituted Mjolnir whose enchantment adds a foot to her height, turns her straight dark hair into magnificent golden locks, and enables her to smash baddies as effectively as her passive-aggressive divine ex. Alongside an action-starved Valkyrie (Tessa Thompson), the two Thors, Korg, and a pair of large noisy goats the Odinson picked up in his time with the Guardians set forth to wreck Gorr’s plans to annihilate all so-called deities across the cosmos. Bale turns in a fascinating performance as Gorr, but it feels fragmented, like with a little more screen time the cackling, manic parts and the cooler, calculating parts might knit together a little more effectively. Hemsworth’s Thor is still being written in the goofy, blustering mode Waititi used in RAGNAROK, but things do get real when lives and heartbreak are at stake (and there’s a couple of scenes where the bluster turns positively charming as he’s addressing a group of Asgardian children). I’ve seen others write of the film’s tonal whiplash, but A. it didn’t bother me much, and B. I swear that’s a product of the tight edit — this thing never stops to breathe. I would be remiss if I didn’t mention the bonkers side-trip to the golden city of the gods where our heroes meet Russell Crowe‘s lunatic version of Zeus, with his mighty lightning bolt, weird-ass accent, and little sheer skirt. It’s a playfully over-the-top performance that has the side effect of making you think Gorr might have the right idea, the film’s crazy juxtaposition of tones actually feeding into one of its core ideas nicely. I think I do have to agree with others that RAGNAROK is the sturdier, more cohesive work, but LOVE AND THUNDER is still a cheerful rock’n’roll sci-fi epic of magical mayhem with all the moments of joyful triumph and shocking sorrow you’d hope for. It’s just one that feels like it’s missing anywhere from twenty minutes to an hour. (Amazingly, the audience we saw it with remembered to keep butts in seats for the two post-script scenes.)
