Allow me to add two hours to your life. Above are the only two good bits from Thor: Love & Thunder. You’re welcome.
Chris Hemsworth seems to have been styled, airbrushed, lit – and restrained in gold chains – by Pierre et Gilles. But somehow even gayer.
In fact, he’s been stripped naked and chained by Russell Crowe, playing Zeus as a dadbodded Greek Taverna owner. Which I guess makes Thor his buff Ganymede, or ‘catamite’.
Divine as his nakedness is, could I express a tiny amount of pernickety disappointment with the God of Thunder’s bum, at least compared to the explosive upper superstructure of shoulders, lats, and pecs? It looks like he’s been skipping leg day. I mean, bro, do you even lunge?
Not that I wouldn’t eat it like manna from heaven – but is it wrong to expect perfection from gods?
The previous Thor instalment, Ragnarok (2017), also directed by New Zealander Taika Waititi, was cosmically camp, but great fun and well-made – proving that camp doesn’t have to be an excuse for crap. As it is here, sadly. Though perhaps superhero camp is a slippery, glittery slope. Especially when your main character is a bit slow and dull, is played by someone with limited acting chops – and you no longer have bitchy Loki or big butch Hulk around to bromance with.
It was probably a bad sign for the Thor franchise that I liked the self-mocking Thor flicks. You see, I don’t much like superhero movies. And I’m definitely not their target market, being so ancient. Oh, of course I love the bods. I have a shamelessly gay Pavlovian response to the way superhero films passively objectify their action heroes. And they have of course been a major, swole, spandex-clad driving-force behind spornosexuality.
A compression-clad gym hero of social media is the only kind of superhero most of us can aspire to be. Or shag.
The first Captain America movie back in 2011, set the tone: it’s the story of a skinny geek injected with steroids by Dr Frank-N-Furter and shoved in a giant microwave and – DING! – served up as a sizzling hot Men’s Health cover model that makes everyone’s jaw hit the lab floor.
Or at least, the only bit I was interested in was.
And herein lies my general, perverse problem with superhero movies. There’s too much action. And usually only one sporno money shot – a topless, glistening, lit-from-below scene, filmed on the first day of shooting, when the star is in peak, shredded condition after months spent training twice a day with their Sado PT, and treating carbs as radioactive.
And it is in the trailer. Which is either false advertising or bad business sense.
In Love and Thunder, the topless money-shot is also a bottomless money shot – a slutty escalation of superhero exhibitionism I’m all in favour of. (Though you did get to see Hulk’s big, green, GGI arse getting out of the hot tub in Ragnarok – and Thor’s alarmed reaction to getting an eyeful of the monster meat.)
And yes, it’s in the trailer below – which I’ve doctored so it begins and ends with it.
Just as all superhero movies should.
(PS – the women swooning at Thor’s hammer reminded me somewhat of this ‘objectifying’ aftershave ad from a few years back.)