2 out of 5

Director: Kenneth Branagh

So, it happened. And it was ho hum. In the first few minutes of Thor, you somehow know it’s going to be one of those movies. One of those movies where nothing much seems to matter even though a lot is going on on the screen. And I’d like to rate it above Hollywood claptrap – I want the Marvel buildup to be a good thing, and Kenneth Branagh was, like, Shakespeare, right? – but Thor is a questioningly structured underwhelming spectacle of nothing new. Natalie Portman, Kat Dennings and Stellan Skarsgard open the movie as scientists tracking something. We know exactly who these characters are not because of clever scripting or amazing acting but because the movie requires us to know. They scientifically track a storm and then run into a beefy guy with a car. But Wait – let us flash back to find out how our beefy guy got there… It’s a worthwhile setup dumbed down by Branagh’s clumsy handling of massive special effects (they wash across the screen from movie’s start too consistently and without a sense of scope to ever achieve the wow-factor they are seemingly supposed to) and the script (though co-written by TV/movie/comic/book hopper J.M.Straczynski) which seems unaware of how pacing works in movies. We are introduced to Odin, and Thor, and Asgard, and a whole world which seems very silly and tiny and not stocked with the gods we’re told it is. Eventually we wrap back around to that beefy guy on Earth, which cues some required “what doth this do” interactions and a boring battle to regain, essentially, the throne of Asgard. It’s not horrible -there are some interesting concepts and in the hands of a punchier director the camp would’ve worked- it just doesn’t know where to throw its weight tone-wise and so ends up being very bland and tips the scale from fun toward hollow.