Thor: Ragnarok Movie Review

The New Thor Movie Never Hammers  In The Fun

Starring Chris Hemsworth, Tom Hiddleston, Tessa Thompson

Directed by Taika Waititi

Rating: ** ½(2 and a half stars)

So okay, this comicbook-into-movie is  more  fun than many of  its recent dark dreary and selfimportant  predecessors.But it’s not half as good as it could have been if  Chris Hemsworth  could act.He loses his weapon, the character-defining hammer, early in  the plot. And  he happily  appears vulnerable and defenceless when the  situation demands.

Everyone else can. Hemsworth can’t. Which is  a pity , as he has some of  the film’s funniest lines to say.Hemsworth says  them the way actors read their thankyou speeches at the Oscars  from teleprompters. Filled with fake pauses and plenty of preening and posturing .

More is  the pity  since Hemsworth is surrounded by a bevy of superb actors, all  in their  playful bantering best. Nearly everyone gets  their bright tone  right,  none more so than the Oscar winning Cate  Blanchett.  Our Shekhar Kapur’s Elizabeth here plays the archvillain Hela who is Thorn’s evil sister whose diabolic designs must be stopped before it’s too late.

Blanchett has  a  ball saying lines about the misery of  common humanity with  a swagger that  reinvents stiff upperlip sexiness. She  gets  relatively less  space than the saucy sozzled Valkyrie(Tessa Thompson)  the  only character who has a change of heart  in  the  course  of  the  furious narrative.And boy, is she a sharpshooter!  We can count on her to save  civilization  from catastrophe, as we can count on director Taika Waititi to convert the cult of comicbook cataclysm  into  a delightful  romp in the  rough.

Mankind, I am happy to report, scarcely seems  interested  in  saving itself in this ravishing rampage of a  movie filled with tonal inflexions that include gravity and giggles  in  the same  line of vision. The central conflict takes time to be reached. But  the journey is not  a slog. The  characters have  fun with one another and with the theme  of  comicbook heroism as they brace themselves  to serve  the  cause of humanity.

The central attraction is  a wrestling bout between Thor and the Hul(Mark Ruffalo, brilliantly  baffled as the over-sized superhero and his puny human avatar)  in  a virtual arena run by a ‘Grandmaster’ (Jeff Goldbum) who is possibly gay.

I  am just guessing about the character’s sexuality  from hints that are strewn across the narrative . No one is  in  a heterosexual relationship in this film. There are no stolen kisses  in between  bouts of bravado.There is a lot of male bonding which suggests that machismo has nothing to do with one’s sexual orientation. Just as a super-hero  has no direct relationship with the universes that he conquers.

Heroism is  all in the mind.And full marks to this super-hero film for putting across  the images  of a bleeding mankind without showing any  blood.