It’s quite an achievement for a film-maker to put their own personal stamp on a multimillion-dollar studio production movie quite as empathically as Taika Waititi has done, first with Thor: Ragnarok and now with Thor: Love and Thunder. Zack Snyder manages it; the films of James Gunn bear the recognisable fingerprints of their director. But Waititi is in a different league. There are moments in Love and Thunder when the film feels like a $185m megaphone, dedicated solely to amplifying the voice of Taika Waititi. Response to the film will be neatly divided along the line between those who are convinced that he can do no wrong and those who find his brand of chipper mateyness and disingenuous sentimentality increasingly irksome. I find myself veering towards the latter camp.
We join Thor (Chris Hemsworth) in the midst of an existential crisis, having never fully moved on from his relationship with Jane Foster (Natalie Portman). The hammer-wielding Asgardian with the disconcertingly Oxbridge accent is moonlighting with the Guardians of the Galaxy. There’s a moment, after Thor has defeated a bunch of alien hell-owls on flying bikes, but destroyed a crystal temple, the cherished institution he was meant to be protecting, when he is congratulating himself, in his rousing toff voice, on a job well done. And you wonder if a moment of satirical political commentary has snuck into the screenplay. For the most part, however, this romp, which pits Thor against Christian Bale’s cadaverous God-slayer, is superficial stuff – a film that brings a greeting-card triteness to its themes of love and sacrifice; that harvests internet memes (screaming goats) in the service of easy laughs.
