Hela stupid! (Get it?) Thor 3 is good fun, but grossly overrated

Rating: 6/10 (6 November 2017)

I'll admit it: part of me loved Thor 3. I certainly got my $15 worth of action, spectacle and laughs from this movie. The trade-off was that I lost an equivalent 15 brain cells while watching this dumb schlock.
My biggest problem with the movie? It's a comedy. Worse, a comedy based on the premise that characters such as Thor, the Hulk and Surtur are innately ridiculous and don't deserve to be taken seriously. The movie laughs at them, not with them.
Why does this bother me? Because I've read and enjoyed the far more serious Thor comics written by Walt Simonson and J. Michael Straczynski. What Marvel has done here is take a bunch of those great comics, stitch them together into a clumsy Frankenstein's Monster of a plot, and add tons of corny punchlines. It's fun, yeah, but it sure ain't a 10/10 masterpiece.
My ideal Thor movie would have a realistic, primitive, gritty feel - like Conan. And it would focus on the violent power politics of the Asgardian royal family - like Game of Thrones. Presumably, Alan Taylor was trying to do something like that with Thor 2, before Marvel re-edited that unfortunate film into one of their kid-friendly joke fests.
The problem with the comedy approach is that nothing has dramatic weight. Several tragic things happen in Thor 3, but none of them carry any emotional impact. That's because, five seconds after every tragic event, someone cracks a joke. 5...4...3...2...1...joke! Whew, I was kinda sad about that major character's violent death for a moment there, but thankfully the emotion passed!
Of course, there's nothing wrong with a film that's content to be light entertainment. Not everything needs to be violent or heavily emotional. But, I personally would've preferred a Thor sequel with more weight than this. Alas, Thor 3 takes the same campy approach as Batman & Robin - it merely has somewhat better jokes and special effects.