After watching Thor: Love and Thunder, I really have no idea what the Marvel Cinematic Universe’s current “phase 4” (of which this movie is the midpoint) is really all about. For the most part, it’s been a bunch of new characters that haven’t exactly made a huge splash, and a few middling stories/sequels with established characters which don’t seem too important (except for Spider-Man: No Way Home, which I loved). Sadly, this Thor sequel is pretty meh. Writer-director Taika Waititi is back with his trademark wise-cracking humour (the tone of this movie feels a lot like Thor: Ragnarok), but unfortunately this time around it feels more tired than refreshing since we haven’t exactly been bombarded with intense and explosive Avengers movies in a while.

When we’d last left Thor (still played perfectly by Chris Hemsworth), he was headed off with the Guardians of the Galaxy (great to see them, as always) to have some spacey adventures. That would have been such a fun premise for this Thor movie (though it probably would have stepped on the upcoming Guardians of the Galaxy sequel movie) — in fact there is comic book precedent for the mashup. “Asgardians of the Galaxy” is a real thing. Unfortunately, as the subtitle “Love and Thunder” suggests, we’re not going there (and after a fun adventure montage with the Guardians, Thor heads back out on his own with his buddy Korg) and we are revisiting Thor’s relationship with human scientist Jane Foster instead. So while Thor: Ragnarok gave us a sprinkling of workplace humour with Thor calling Hulk “a friend from work”, now we get a whole lot of rom-com laughs overlaid onto this superhero adventure. There’s the classic scene setups where Thor and Jane (who has now been transformed into the Mighty Thor, aka female Thor) have cringey debates about how long it’s been since their breakup and who dumped who. I do, however, enjoy the cute and funny scenes where Thor (and Chris Hemsworth’s comedic acting is pretty good here) expresses sadness and jealousy at having been jilted not so much by his ex-girlfriend, but more by his ex-magical hammer Mjolnir who has moved on to a relationship with Jane instead. To top it off, there’s an even more cringey montage of scenes from Thor and Jane’s couplehood leading to their breakup accompanied by some Abba music (which was admittedly perfect given Thor’s Nordic background).

Aside from all this fluffy rom-com stuff, the main driver of the action is ostensibly the fight against Christian Bale’s Gorr the God Butcher — a religious zealot from another world who becomes an enemy of all gods after losing his daughter and learning that his gods don’t care. I’m not sure why Waititi or producer Kevin Feige thought that this would be a good villain and story to pair with the whole Jane Foster story. It seemed to be super-intense and dark, so it never felt like they were two parts of the same movie. After Gorr kidnaps a bunch of Asgardian children in order to lure Thor (and his magical axe Stormbringer) to confront him, it always seemed inappropriate for the humourous dialogue and banter between characters on the way to rescuing them. In fact, even scenes of the children themselves in Gorr’s cell seem jokey and trivial. All together, it felt like there were pretty much no stakes to this movie, even though the villain was killing whole pantheons of gods.

The other big scene of the movie (which figures prominently in the trailer) is the scene of Thor, Jane, Korg and Valkyrie going to Omnipotence City (which is basically a cosmic hub for MCU deities) in order to warn the gods, including the mighty Zeus, about Gorr. Similar to the Grandmaster’s arena from Thor: Ragnarok, Omnipotence City is basically an opportunity for a wide variety of fun character designs and winking references (including one Disney nod, that I thought was pretty stupid, to Bao the god of dumplings — my thin, dumpling skin was a little offended that this joke was the only Chinese deity on scene). The whole time at Omnipotence City was extremely tongue-in-cheek and laughable. A portly Russell Crowe did not channel a single ounce of his Gladiator persona, Maximus, into his portrayal of Zeus. Instead he seemed to be portrayed more as the blustering, fat-cat, capricious type of god that Gorr was out to destroy (and he didn’t feel like much of a loss).

In the end, this movie was mostly fluff. Many of the elements of an epic story were there — even including big sacrifice — but it did not come together in an epic way. The humour and tone kept a lot the movie pretty fragmented and dreamily disjointed. And like a dream, I find myself rapidly forgetting the details until I will lose it altogether — and sadly that doesn’t feel like much of a loss either. (3.5 out of 5)