Lazy writing leads to lots of missed opportunities

Rating: 2/10 (18 February 2014)

Let me start immediately with my major gripe; the writing is awful across the board; the story, the dialogue and the action are all extremely bland.
Ten minutes into the movie, the story appears to be identical to that of Avengers, and it stays like that until the end. An immense old power is found, the good guys try to destroy it and the bad guys use it to take over the world. The power is nondescript and functions as a deus ex throughout the film. The big disappointment is that, you don't get a good demonstration of what this power is until 90 minutes into the movie, and without spoiling too much I can say that it really isn't that much of a threat at all, just like the relatively small army of aliens in the Avengers wasn't much of an actual threat either. I truly can't imagine any way the premise of the movie could have been worse. Copying the premise right from your last major release and making the bad guys even less of a threat...
The dialogue consists mostly of cheesy one-liners, which doesn't help making the relationship between Thor and his family, and him and Jane more interesting, even though things got of to a reasonably good start in the first Thor movie. There's hardly any real tension save for the most textbook cliché's with Thor challenging his father in an argument, where the king's position is portrayed as such a blatant idiocy he loses all his stature.
The enemies are 'dark elves' which all look identical and about which we learn absolutely zero-squat except that they are invisible to everything and everyone unless they need to be beaten by a bunch of Asgardians to aid the progression of the 'story'.
Meanwhile, we visit Asgard, but we learn nothing about it either. We see identical and disposable soldiers/guards and a king sitting in a large EMPTY palace, and that's all. The one star I gave is for the rare moment of humor and displacement when the queen of Asgard briskly tells Jane to do everything she tells her to without question, and Jane immediately realizes that this woman who's bossing her around is not just a demigod but also her new mother in law. There is so much more room for stuff like this, however it's never used.
The fighting choreography is awful; mainly lot's of close-ups of elbows hitting prop-armor. The tactics of Asgard's armies are those of kindergarten play-warfare; run forward and shoot, nothing more.
Truly a lackluster affair..