★★☆☆☆

I gotta say Love and Thunder was a huge disappointment. I’m sure it was probably much better in the movie theater than on the small screen, but they really skimped on the story. Movie was almost all special effects. Yes, they had the story line of Jane with stage 4 cancer, but they dramatically changed the ensemble.

You Need a Scorecard for Movie Order

Marvel has really jumped the shark with movie/story overlap. You cannot simply watch a movie about one of the characters you like and understand it. Wish I had looked at the Tech Radar list before I moved Love and Thunder to the top of my rental queue. I didn’t even know there was a Hawkeye movie.

According to that list you have to watch a bunch of stuff that is only on Disney streaming if you want to make any sense of the story line. I guess that explains how Disney Streaming lost $1.5 billion last year. Large geographic regions in America don’t have enough Internet bandwidth to stream. They rent movies or watch them in theaters. If they know up front half of what they need to know about a story line is only on a streaming service they won’t pay to see the movie. If they do accidentally see it without knowing (like I did) expect a shit review.

Missing Characters

While I haven’t gotten around to posting reviews for the other Thor movies, I actually liked them. What I liked was the ensemble of “mere mortals” that came along with Jane. In particular I liked wise-cracking Darcy.

Kind of an extension of her 2 Broke Girls character, but people love that character. That would by why the show is doing so well in syndication. Wise-cracking with a touch of a nasally sound in your voice just plays well with the general audience.

Well, you can forget about that, only a brief appearance in the beginning. The Erik Selvig character only makes one video call appearance. That’s the extent of the humans we knew. Guess we never find out what happened with Darcy and “the intern” from The Dark World? Maybe that was on one of the streaming only things?

Too Many Cameos

It’s like every actor in Hollywood that has had a movie people might have seen was plugged into bit roles here. You know it is a franchise swan song when that happens. Seems like the writers shredded mythology just to add more cameos. Wtf is Zeus doing in a story about a Viking god?

The “New Asgard” Theme Park

The “New Asgard” theme park and fast buck extravaganza was a bridge, lake, and train ride too far. Again, this seems to be a vehicle that only exists to provide more cameo opportunities. Yes, we had to have actors playing Thor, Loki, and Odin on a stage of the fast buck before the visitor tour took them for “real Asgard ale.

You get introduced to this theme park early in the film. When it got to the stage of the fast buck is when I made my decision to never give another dollar to the Marvel Universe. That scene made obvious this film was just one last grab for cash on the way out the door.

Summary

In short, they forgot to put anything in this movie for the adults. You know, people who don’t read comic books, and don’t stream Disney. It really felt like this was a desperate attempt to force people to stream Disney so they could figure out the story line. I won’t be spending another dollar on the Marvel universe after having seen this.

For more movie rental ideas please see list one and list two.