After redeeming himself in Avengers: Endgame, Thor searches for peace and meaning and his quest leads him to the path of Gorr: the God Butcher, who wants to wipe out all the gods from existence.
When Taika Waititi helmed Thor: Ragnarok, he changed the franchise by giving us a movie that appeared light-hearted but masked a dark movie with a lot of pain coupled with compelling stories for all characters involved.
The jokes were fun, the action and fights had (and still do have) immense rewatch value, and through all the jokes, you could see the journey each character had from the beginning of Ragnarok to the end.
For Thor: Love and Thunder, we got a double, maybe triple dose of the jokes but absolutely nothing else.
There was no balance so it just didn’t work this time around. A good example of this is how you have a villain whose motive can make even the most religious human think for a bit especially when suffering is concerned, but for some reason, it felt like Gorr was put in that movie to make jokes.
As someone who has read the comic book and was giddy to see Christian Bale play the god butcher, I was sad once the movie ended because Gorr is an extremely forgettable villain.
The sheer overall unseriousness of Thor: Love and Thunder was a missed opportunity for Gorr to become a villain as memorable as Thanos and Killmonger.
There wasn’t any single memorable fight scene, the dialogue sometimes made me wonder whether I was watching a really bad Deadpool movie, and the movie’s reliance on not taking itself seriously made even the most emotional scenes come out flat.
It’s a huge miss for me. I almost feel like Thor: The Dark World has a slightly better edge over this one.
It’s clear that they all had fun filming the movie, but I didn’t have fun watching it.
Is Thor: Love and Thunder worth watching? No, but sadly, you might have to watch it to understand the next movie.