The last Thor movie was a lot of fun, you'll recall. Taking over the franchise reins for Marvel's third solo romp with the hunky thunder god, director Taika Waititi injected the 2017 Thor: Ragnarok with impish wit (even the fire demon got a cute line) and managed to freshen up a key component of the Marvel Cinematic Universe (an enterprise now in its fourteenth year).
Waititi's second Thor outing, Love and Thunder, is also fun, but not as much. A down-shift is apparent right at the beginning, as we watch a pitiful character called Gorr (Christian Bale) traipsing across a vast desert salt flat with a dying child in his arms. The child is Gorr's daughter, and when she does in fact die, he curses the gods who failed to save her and the rest of his family. Vowing to destroy all deities—Greek, Roman, Aztec, whichever—he becomes Gorr the God Butcher, and our story begins.
