A baroque but dumb entry in swords and sorcery

Rating: 6/10 (6 May 2011)

Thor rumbles violently enough to shake the theatre, and if that's all you want than that's all you'll get. It's a film that looks spectacular but sounds lame. Such a baroque project doesn't deserve such a bad screenplay which is comprised of stilted dialogue and bad plotting.
Swords and Sorcery is tricky, not many films get it right, and Thor is an example of why. There are too few surprises. It's not all that hard to figure out where the movie is going, and although it effectively gets a few laughs in, Thor feels rather humourless and doesn't have much of a soul. There isn't much of a character to the protagonist, and subsequently not much for actor Chris Hemsworth to work with. In fact, I strongly felt he got upstaged by his co-star/love interest. Natalie Portman is quite delightful, and far more frisky than I'm used to seeing in her, the movie becomes equally brisky when she's on screen.
For a film as Theatrical in appearance as Thor, it comes across as slightly disappointing that it fails to raise a pulse or generate excitement. The only time it comes close is in one scene where Thor, on Earth, must break into a Quarentine to retrieve his hammer. which is wedged in stone and nobody can pull it out. The only thing more discouraging than that is the fact that nobody has considered the option of breaking the stone.
If you plan to go see Thor, my advice is this. don't see it in 3-D, because there are parts where it's too dark to see anything, and don't even bother to make connections between this movie and Viking mythology. Thor will satisfy some, but I wasn't too impressed.