Roger Ebert is not on Team Thor

Roger Ebert is not on Team Thor

Ebert says:

"Thor is failure as a movie. Here is a film that is scoring 79% on Rotten Tomatoes. For what? The standards for comic book superhero movies have been established by Superman, The Dark Knight, Spider-Man 2 and Iron Man. In that company Thor is pitiful."

I'm with Ebert to some extent. The writing is sub-par, the plot exists merely to serve special effects, and the characters are underdeveloped. The acting is not so hot, either. The guy who plays Thor, although an Aussie, comes up with a hybrid of Aussie, British and American speech that varies from scene to scene. "Youah big. Fought bigga" is delivered in his usual Aussie accent. Other times he's using faux-RSC British. And sometimes he seems to be channeling that famed Norse deity called Spicoli, so that I was waiting for his phrases to end with a slight pause, followed by "dude."

And why does a battle between the Norse gods Thor and Loki end with people fighting a metal robot in the American desert? Is that the limit of the author's imagination? The final face-off with the silly robot reminded me of another ridiculous metallic creation wandering through the desert in yet another unnecessary showdown in yet another film associated with Kenneth Branagh. The great Shakespearean has now officially established himself as Hollywood's go-to guy for silly robots tramping through the desert. (I'm referencing the much-loathed Wild Wild West, in which Branagh was actually piloting an even sillier robot than the one in Thor.)

However, I wouldn't call the movie a failure. I like what Branagh and the production designers did with some of the scenes that take place away from earth. The film does have some imagination, and that's really an important component of our love for super-hero fantasies.