Lightning did not strike twice for Taika Waititi and the Thor franchise. Thor: Love and Thunder lacks the impish spark that elevated Ragnarok above nearly all of the Marvel movies. When the biggest laughs come from the celebrity cameos, you know something is rotten in Asgard. The direction is spritely enough, but the script has a few insurmountable problems. One of those is the children in peril motif. The villain of the piece, Christian Bale's Gorr, kidnaps Asgard's junior set so he can lure Thor into a trap. The kids are innocent victims and not all that interesting. Waititi has continually utilized children in his scenarios, probably because he is just a big kid himself, but they have previously been scamps. That sense of mischief is missing in this film, as are the sorely missed Tom Hiddleston and Jeff Goldblum. Even Tessa Thompson's Valkyrie seems less joyously anarchic this time around.
A bigger problem is Thor's love interest, Jane Foster, who has been give stage four cancer for this opus. Now maybe Natalie Portman put her foot down and said, dudes, this is my last go round in the Thor saga and Waititi and company thought the big C was a good way to build up sympathy for the character before they offed her. Instead, it just puts a damper on the proceedings. The film is nowhere near as stodgy as Branagh's Thor, but Waititi has similar problems building romantic chemistry between Ms. Portman and Chris Hemsworth. Hemsworth is a bit of a lost cause as an actor. Like Channing Tatum, he exists in film to drop trou, a dorsal view here of course, but, unlike Tatum, he is not enough of an actor to make it seem like he is in on the joke. The jokes aimed at his metal dimness seem tired in ...Love and Thunder. Portman is a more frustrating case. In her youth, she seemed promising, but her mature work after Black Swan has been disappointing. In her juvenilia, she exhibited interesting chemistry with Jean Reno in The Professional and Timothy Hutton in Beautiful Girls, but her scenes with Hemsworth are as flat as her ones with Hayden Christensen in the Star Wars films.
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