119 min | PG-13 | July 8, 2022 | Walt Disney Studios Motion Pictures
Thor has beaten every enemy and run out of reasons to fight. Then a grieving zealot starts butchering gods and his ex shows up swinging his old hammer. The villain wants to kill every god in the universe. The movie wants to crack jokes while he does it.
Thor has saved the universe and lost the plot. He wanders space with the Guardians of the Galaxy, fighting boredom as much as monsters, searching for a purpose he cannot name. Then Gorr the God Butcher starts killing gods across the cosmos, and Thor’s ex Jane Foster reappears wielding his old hammer as the Mighty Thor. Taika Waititi builds the film around a real question. What does an immortal warrior do when the fighting stops mattering. The movie keeps asking that question and then interrupts itself with a joke before the answer can land.
Chris Hemsworth plays Thor as a man performing confidence he no longer feels. He commits to the bit and finds the loneliness underneath the posturing. Christian Bale plays Gorr as a grieving father turned zealot, gaunt and whispering, and he gives the film its only sustained menace. Natalie Portman plays Jane Foster with warmth and dread, a scientist facing mortality who treats godhood as a second chance and a distraction. Tessa Thompson plays King Valkyrie as a bored monarch who misses the battlefield. Russell Crowe plays Zeus as a vain buffoon, and the cameo stops the movie cold.
Waititi directs and co-writes with Jennifer Kaytin Robinson, and the visual design swings hard toward candy-colored excess. The sequence on Gorr’s shadow planet drains the frame to black and white, and that one choice does more dramatic work than any of the color. Barry Idoine’s cinematography saturates the cosmos until it reads as a toy box. The editing cuts away from every emotional beat to chase the next gag. The needle drops lean on Guns N’ Roses to manufacture momentum the script does not earn.
This is a film with a strong villain, a genuine ache about death and meaning, and no discipline to hold either. Bale and Portman are playing a tragedy. Waititi keeps cutting back to a comedy. The two halves never reconcile because the movie refuses to choose which one it believes. There is a darker, sadder Thor film buried inside this one, and you can see it flicker every time the screaming goats stop screaming.