Chris Hemsworth is Thor in Marvel’s “Thor: The Dark World.”
Tom Hiddleston as Loki, left, brings spark to Chris Hemsworth’s cranky Thor.About the Film’THOR: THE DARK WORLD’Rating: PG-13 or sequences of intense sci-fi action and violence and some suggestive content.Running time: 1 hour, 52 minutes.
Thor is a bore.
While 2011’s “Thor” had some heart, warmth and genuine character growth to raise it above the ordinary, “Thor: The Dark World” has none. It’s a lumbering ox of a movie that lurches and stumbles rather than flows, alternating boredom and bedlam. It’s simply another link in the multi-billion-dollar Marvel movies chain. You can practically hear the cash register going “Cha-ching!”
Perhaps we’ve just seen too many of these superhero movies at this point. We know what’s going to happen — and not happen. The superhero is going to win (it’s a superhero, after all); no one of importance is going to die (hey! you’ve signed contracts for sequels already); there’s going to be three big, boomer action pieces, one in the first third, one in the second and the destruction-porn blowout at the end.
“The Dark World” follows that script to the lockstep letter, but it fails to offer anything that hasn’t been seen before. Worse, it doesn’t significantly advance the story or go anywhere interesting. Except for the final battle, which throws in some trans-dimensional physics to make it interesting, the action sequences are meh. And, in between those sequences, the plot sags and drags and gets you checking your watch.