The movie is fun but Hela's character is such a disappointment

Rating: 1/10 (30 December 2018)

I really enjoyed the first 20 minutes or so and thought it was a great start (minus some of the utterly eye-rolling attempts at humor), but for me it all sort of came to a screeching halt once Odin died and it was revealed that Hela was Thor's sister.
It was just a terrible writing decision for the character and made her look like nothing more than a second-rate Loki clone. It pretty much destroyed the entire movie for me because I was really hoping this character would be another good villain like Vulture, but alas she is probably one of the worst to date. Visually her costume design was perfect, she was surprisingly hot to look at, and Cate Blanchett played her well enough (it was far from her best performance mind you), but the character writing itself was horribly lazy and unoriginal. She was just a completely one-note and stupidly overpowered character who was evil for the sole purpose of being evil and was angry at people who punished her for being evil. And every scene between her and Thor felt incredibly awkward and forced because the two had no established relationship with one another and no real reason to hate each other (unlike Loki who already had more development in the first half of the first Thor movie than Hela did throughout the entire course of this film). Her not looking anything like Thor or Odin in appearance didn't do her any favors either. She had practically no interaction with any of the main protagonist characters aside from talking to Thor for maybe 5 minutes at the most throughout the entire movie. Most of her screen time was wasted on Skurge (another lame villain who I'll talk about later). And the big, ugly, rotten cherry on top of all of this is that she practically had no real plan once she got Asgard, so her threat didn't feel genuine to me. The only reason there was a conflict at all during the final battle is because she was too focused on making her grand introduction to take the Bifrost Sword upon arriving in Asgard as to avoid it being stolen by Heimdall. I guess her plan was to destroy the other eight realms while rambling about her ego?
I know it's a fantasy film, but whoever wrote this seriously expects the audience to believe that Hela was just born looking the way she did with the set of powers that she had; powers that no other Asgardian possessed and an appearance that looked like she should have been related to Loki instead of Thor? Sorry, I just don't support stuff like this. As a big fan of Cate Blanchett it's depressing that she was wasted like this and I don't think the character writing deserved her in the role or her perfect costume design at all.
The good news, however, is that if you are not like me and didn't expect or want much out of Hela then you will probably love this film. The main Thor vs. Hulk fight was great and I actually rather enjoyed the banter between the two on Sakaar. Thor's character arc here was a massive improvement over The Dark World, but I still prefer his arc from the first Thor movie just due to my bias preference for that film. Valkyrie was also a decent and welcome character, but they could have done more with her IMO. Loki was still on point but I wish we had seen him interact with Doctor Strange more; that cameo from Cumberbatch was great. However, once they got to Asgard for the final battle it all fell apart for me again because there was no real weight to it; partly due to Hela's terrible character writing and partly due to the nonstop humor which just didn't work during a serious battle.
Jeff Goldblum and Karl Urban were also completely wasted on lame one-note side characters who didn't do anything particularly memorable throughout the entire film... well in all fairness Skurge had a cool final battle scene, but that's about it.
Overall this film could have been way better had the main villain's character writing been at least passable (it was considerably below average IMO) and had the final battle just been more serious. But taking all of my issues into consideration, it sits at the very bottom of the barrel for me when it comes to the MCU - and I have not once walked out of a single MCU movie outright hating it prior to the night I saw Ragnarok.
7/10 without Hela's horrible writing and the disappointing final battle, 1/10 with everything included.