If it’s the first weekend in May, it must be Marvel superhero time. Spider-Man and its two sequels, plus both Iron Man movies and the Wolverine prequel, have all kick-started the summer movie season in burly style. Now it’s Thor’s turn. The Norse god — first Marvelized in a 1962 comic book — introduces what is conceived as a zillion-part movie series about the Avengers team of Marvel stalwarts. Captain America, impersonated by Chris Evans, gets his own starring chapter in July; another Avenger, the James Bondian Nick Fury , comes next year.
Like its namesake, Thor is big, blond-bland, handsomely put together and a little musclebound. Played by an Aussie Adonis named Chris Hemsworth, whose looks and demeanor suggest a young, airbrushed Nick Nolte, Thor sports a permanent scowl — perhaps because, in the alternate universe of the movie business, he had his, oh, thunder stolen by the carjackers of Fast Five, which jumped the traditional opening date of the Hollywood blockbuster season by a week and proved a popular smash. So this weekend Thor faces two daunting challenges: to vanquish his enemies in mythological Norway and modern-day New Mexico, and to top Fast Five’s $86.2-million box-office haul. The Best and Worst Super Bowl Commercials of 2011: Thor
Early on, that seems an impossible task, given the heavy weather of the first part of the film. Set in the mists of ancient Asgard — the home of Thor, his brother Loki and their regal dad Odin — these scenes are as starchy and stentorian as the cloudland sequences in superhero films of old. Great actors tend to go fruity when slumming as fantasy-film deities, and Hopkins nearly surrenders to that campy impulse. The drama flirts so flagrantly with self-parody that one half-expects the actors to burst into their own Mel Brooks lampoon, with Hopkins spritzing, “I just disowned my son and heir, and, boy, is he Thor.”
Given that Thor is a gigantic surfer-god, and Loki slim and black-clad, the film’s platoon of writers might have gone the familiar Marvel route of turning the malcontent into a troubled hero, a la Peter Parker. But they stick to the Aryan tradition of blond as beautiful and dark as malevolent. The early sequences are also clotted with confounding backstory dialogue — like Thor’s “Have you forgotten all we’ve done together?” — that will have non-Marvelettes thinking they’ve wandered into the middle of another movie. Let’s see: a cold land, frosty mytho-creatures, icy art direction, a woozily pompous atmosphere — could this be an unwished-for sequel to The Last Airbender?
Then you recall that the director is Kenneth Branagh, the actor-director who a quarter-century ago was called the next Olivier — a prophesy that became an albatross. Like Lord Larry, he starred in and directed films of Henry V and Hamlet, but he lacked Olivier’s divine fire; he was more a clever manager than a matinee idol. Between Shakespeares
