Hammering the humour

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 11/07/2022 (1553 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

As DC and Marvel battle for the love — and the money — of moviegoers, DC seems to have doubled down on heaviness, with the most recent Batman flick going very broody, dour and dark.

Meanwhile the MCU gets lighter, with the latest Thor movie skewing hard toward comedy, with screaming goats and winking cameos and a semi-ironic Guns N’ Roses soundtrack.

When it comes to this particular pop-culture fight, I’m usually Team Marvel. Finding a lot of the DC Universe projects tediously self-serious, I like the MCU notion that superhero stories might actually be, you know, fun.

Why not bring in a little comedy to loosen things up, keep things at a recognizable human scale, with superheroes who bicker and bitch and save the world and go for shawarma?

And if a little comedy is a good thing, shouldn’t a lot of comedy be even better?

But it turns out, no, at least if Thor: Love and Thunder is anything to go by.

Helmed and co-scripted by Taika Waititi, this fourth entry in the series revs up toward peak comedy and then just shoots off a cliff into an unwatchable, trying-too-hard abyss. With limp action and thudding jokes, this wouldbe superhero comedy made me want to move to Gotham City.

The Thor franchise has always played around a bit with humour. Starring Chris Hemsworth, the Hemsworthiest of the Hemsworth brothers, as the god of thunder, the first two movies open with what seem like big stakes: epic CGI battles; declamatory pseudo- Shakespearean dialogue; inscrutable enemies in heavy prosthetics; massive daddy issues.

But while Thor is often seen in Serious Heroic mode in the realm of Asgard, once you get him to Earth, where he’s wearing Levis and eating Pop Tarts and being a little confused, his supremely self-assured character gets a much-needed comic shakeup.

Thor (2011) set that template, and Thor: Dark World (2013) was basically a weaker reprise. It kept some of our hero’s Father-always-liked-you-best scrapping with brother Loki (Tom Hiddleston) but went a little darker, as the title suggests. It got middling reviews.

Thor: Ragnarok (2017), which was Waititi’s Marvel directorial debut, was widely seen as a reset, giving these now familiar characters a bit of a bounce-back by bringing in some of that Waititi weirdness.

Comic oddities included Jeff Goldblum being Jeff Goldblum as a minor villain called the Grandmaster, a sulky Hulk (Mark Ruffalo), and a slinky Cate Blanchett camping it up as Hela, the goddess of death.

At one point, the good guys are trying to escape in the Grandmaster’s “orgy ship” (“Don’t touch anything!”), with its orange shag upholstery and funky soundtrack. It’s a bit messy and a lot silly, but Ragnarok mostly pulls off this mix of directed action and aimless goofing around.

Thor: Love and Thunder tips further toward full comedy. It gives Ragnarok fans even more of what they want, craziness- wise, but in the end that piled-on moreness feels like less.

There’s a pantheon of self-absorbed gods, including Zeus, played by Russell Crowe as an aging mobster with an indeterminate Greco-Roman accent. There’s a running gag with Thor’s new weapon, a pathologically jealous axe. There’s orgy talk (again!).

It’s all very zany, but it feels forced, and there’s nothing worse than forced zaniness.

Everything is comic relief, to the point one wonders what it’s relief from. The jokeyness no longer balances the drama and the action; it just undercuts them. It’s hard to feel for a character confronting her mortality or worry about children in jeopardy when there are no stakes.

This approach really squanders the film’s villain, Gorr the God Butcher (Christian Bale), who’s gotten his moniker because he’s struggling with a genuine theological problem: Why has the god he worships allowed the faithful to suffer?

Bale really commits because that’s what he does. But there isn’t much to commit to when nothing matters except the next joke.

Worst of all, most of the jokes aren’t even that good. They might be aiming for sardonic self-awareness, but they often come off as cheap and flippant.

This isn’t entirely Waititi’s fault. The man’s earthbound projects, mid-budget gems such as Reservation Dogs and What We Do in the Shadows, are terrific.

It’s maybe more of a “because capitalism” issue. Waititi’s idiosyncratic and offbeat brand of humour has pushed past the limits of what can work within the vast machinery of the intellectual-property factory that is the Marvel Cinematic Universe.

All he can do now is spoof himself, his material and maybe even his audience.