Kevin Smith Reviews Thor: Love and Thunder

Waves of critics and millions of Marvel fans have already seen Thor: Love and Thunder and weighed in on it – but what does Kevin Smith think about it? That’s the question that we (and only we?) at ComicBook.com always ask, and now we have our answer! The latest episode of Smith and Marc Bernardin’s FatMan Beyond podcast includes a segment where Smith gives his full, unfettered thoughts about Thor 4 – bottom line, he enjoyed director Taika Waititi’s work, just maybe not as much as he did Thor: Ragnarok. 

“Thor Ragnraok was an absolute f*@#ing discovery, and something I was not expecting” Kevin Smith explains in his review. “I went into Thor: Love and Thunder with a certain amount of expectation – based on, of course, what I was given before – and I got exactly what I thought I would get coming. But of course, the element of surprise isn’t quite there like it was last time.”

Before anyone jumps on him, Kevin Smith prefaced the whole discussion by saying he, as a filmmaker himself, is not capable of doing anything close to what Taika Waititi (or any other director) has with a Thor movie. He also went on to shed some more positive light on Love and Thunder in his review: 

“That being said: a f#@!ing devastatingly entertaining Marvel movie. Adorable, fun. The only things I bumped into, storywise: The Guardians were gone so fast, I didn’t know why they needed to be there other than he left one movie [Avengers: Endgame] with them and then showed up in this movie with them, then suddenly they were gone…The other big thing I bumped into was the main plot [laughter].”

Smith joined a chorus of Marvel fans in criticizing how Gorr the God-Butcher (Christian Bale) went from a simple mission (assassinating gods) to embarking on an elaborate “hat-on-a-hat” scheme to kill all gods by luring out a god, taking his god weapon (because the god-killing weapon wasn’t enough) in order to gain audience with a godly entity and make a wish… to kill all gods. Indeed, the more and more it gets examined, the more the plotline of Thor: Love and Thunder looks… off the mark. 

Mark Bernardin went deeper, saying how Thor 4 ended up being a story about Gorr instead of Thor, because of the climatic wish twist that brought back Gorr’s daughter. Bernardin points out that Thor or (more importantly) Natalie Portman’s Jane Foster getting to make the wish to resurrect “Love” and Thor becoming her guardian, hits so much deeper and more poignantly. 

All in all, Kevin Smith’s review of Thor: Love and Thunder fall in line with the general consensus: a hackneyed plot, saved by a whole lot of fun and some strong performances (Christian Bale, Natalie Portman). 

Thor: Love and Thunder is now in theaters.