Thor: Ragnarok *** (2017, Chris Hemsworth, Tom Hiddleston, Cate Blanchett, Idris Elba) – Movie Review

And so actor/director Taika Waititi delivers the 2017 sequel to Thor (2011) and Thor: The Dark World (2013). Let’s get personal. There is only one really good thing about Thor – and that is Thor, Chris Hemsworth’s Thor. Luckily there is a lot of him, so that’s great!

The rest is take it or leave it. Personally, I’d leave it. Tom Hiddleston’s actory Loki gets more and more irritating as the series goes on. Cate Blanchett’s evil sister Hela is a camp caricature, okay but nothing special from a two-time Oscar winner, but what else, what more can she do? She’s  just there camping around. It’s easy money, like a catwalk model. She looks good, and keeps her authority. OK.

Idris Elba as Heimdall gets by in being the one actor who seems to be taking the movie seriously, though this path leads to considerable dullness and disengagement. Jeff Goldblum, on the other hand, is awful, twice as camp, twice as over-made-up as Blanchett, playing another exercise in evil, the Grandmaster. It’s like Goldblum looked at the script, and said to himself it’s a great role, and a great chance, but the game is up, I’ll just have to send it up something rotten. And something rotten it is, Mr Goldblum, a bad turn from a good actor, and there is a huge lot of it.

Then there is rather a lot, way too much, of Benedict Cumberbatch’s pointless Doctor Strange cameo. He is way too like Tom Hiddleston to have both actors in one movie. Cumberbatch’s strange ‘American’ accent is terrible, though admittedly no worse than Hemsworth’s or Blanchett’s ‘English’ accents. In Hemsworth’s case his ‘English’ accent is a liability, clipping his vowels and sentences so you can’t hear many of his ‘funny’ lines.

Anthony Hopkins is as shamelessly, or shamefully hammy as ever as the Welsh god Odin, Tessa Thompson’s Valkyrie is an aggressive, charmless bore, and this time Mark Ruffalo’s Bruce Banner / the Hulk hits the rocks, as struggling now as his predecessors Eric Bana and Edward Norton to make the character work in any kind of interesting way. Nevertheless, Hulk’s epic gladiatorial contest against Thor is a highlight of the movie.

Karl Urban’s Skurge is the one exception to the rule above. He takes the movie seriously, and is a success as horrid henchman, conscripted by her as her executioner. But the best and funniest performance in the movie comes from Stan Lee as Thor’s weird old bloke hairdresser. By the way, as men’s hair is on the agenda, just like Brad Pitt in Legends of the Fall and Orlando Bloom in The Lord of the Rings, Hemsworth looks loads better in the long-hair wig than with his short mousy hair.

The problem with Thor: Ragnarok is tone, well, the main problem. Hemsworth apparently decreed that he’d done serious with Thor a couple of times, and now wanted to do fun, no doubt prompted by Chris Pratt’s success in Guardians of the Galaxy. Putting the comic back into comics is great. I’m that idea’s biggest fan. But fun is tricky. You have to get it just right. It is a knife edge. It’s so easy to tip funny over into campy and silly, and that’s exactly the trap that Thor: Ragnarok falls into.

Hemsworth is good with fun, but not quite as good as he thinks he is with silly. To be fair, the audience at the multimedia show loved his arsing around. Me not so much. It seems like a dumbing down of something that was fairly dumb in the first place.

Need I complain yet again that there is a 130-minute movie with no story? Thor: Ragnarok has a premise: Thor needs to form a little gang, let’s call them The Revengers, to get back to his Asgard planet and prevent some kind of Armageddon or Ragnarök, ‘the doom or destruction of the gods’ in Norse mythology.

[Spoiler alert] That’s it. He does. And he does.

So there we finally come to it. The main problem is the script by Eric Pearson, Craig Kyle and Christopher Yost. Without any real story or direction, it just keeps throwing everything in, more and more (Scarlett Johansson cameo included), and that includes some very silly jokes, some Carry On style. Oh really, the naked Hulk stuff, the anus planet, the masturbation joke? No!

Thor: Ragnarok is easy viewing, disposable entertainment. Okay, it’s zesty, larky and all harmless and in good fun and in high spirits. But it will last no longer than your huge box of popcorn. Now that he’s done a trilogy, Hemsworth needs to move on from Thor, if Marvel will let him. Been there, done that. No more to do or say.

Offbeat choice Taika Waititi is the maker of Hunt for the Wilderpeople (2016).

© Derek Winnert 2017 Movie Review

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