Chris Hemsworth and Taika Waititi in Thor: Ragnarok were titanic in blending MCU superheroics with a comedic edge, which lifted the Thor franchise out of the duldroms and into somewhat uncharted territory. Love and Thunder pairs them together once more, reunited with Tessa Thompson and rejoined by Natalie Portman, and features the added bonus of Christian Bale as Gorr. And it absolutely doesn’t work as a film, despite some enjoyable comedy and some even more impressive darker turns - Thompson is predictably largely ignored as the MCU’s most prominent LGBTQ+ character, Bale isn’t given the chance he deserves to shine and worse Portman’s third outing as Jane Foster is wasted, almost to the point of being abusively so. Where this film needed to be grounded in the women’s stories, particularly Portman given the Jason Aaron material the script was derived from, it remains a nigh-incel level bro fest, with moronic humour robbing what needed to be an interesting, high stakes story of any depth at all, and a wildly misused Gorr, ultimately out to find his genie to save his daughter, no longer ideologically opposed to Gods. And those Gods in this film are indeed fucking awful, Thor very much a case in point.  Where Jane Foster’s cancer arc and position as Thor narratively deserved to be centre stage, her predicament and the impact on her and Thor are dealt with mostly as an afterthought, and very much through exposition rather than even their final scene together delivering much believable emotion. Instead we get about a third of the film with a bizarre Russell Crowe as Zeus, the Greek panethon only introduced for yuks, and gags that don’t stop. Some amuse but they’re very much there in lieu of the themes of abusive godhood and heroism in the face of mortality with any degree of integrity at all. Bale looks amazing as Gorr, but he spends more time in CGI battles than articulating his very valid message, and the stakes surrounding him (and that he’s driven by) are frustratingly thin. Thor as a character moves nowhere in this film, which after the loss of his people and Infinity War, is a storytelling crime. Ragnarok may have benefited through its lead-in to Thanos’ attack on reality, and forced Waititi to restrain his admitted comedic brilliance to deliver an interesting, funny and balanced film. This outing is just one big ego fest and I didn’t really like it.