Here’s what we liked about Thor: Love and Thunder

polygon.com:

The whole Polygon team had issues with the new MCU movie Thor: Love and Thunder, from its flippant character undercutting to its really weird running gag about Thor’s magic ax Stormbreaker acting more like an ex — a creepy, jealous one. A lot of the movie’s bigger themes crash-land more than they soar, but we found a lot to like in the margins. Here’s a rundown of some of the smaller things about the film that we most appreciated.

[Ed. note: Scattered spoilers ahead for Thor: Love and Thunder.]

Tasha Robinson, film/streaming editor: Y’all, this movie let me down in so many ways, but the upside to a movie that can’t take anything seriously for more than 20 seconds at a time without veering toward a visual or verbal gag is that there is an absolute ton of fire-and-forget visual and verbal gags, and some of them are bound to land. One of my favorites is the split-second shot of Thor’s RIP LOKI memorial tattoos when Weirdly Accented Zeus (Russell Crowe) rips Thor’s clothes off in Omnipotence City. In a movie so heavily focused on the corniest, cheesiest aspects of metal culture, the idea of Thor having a really over-the-top metal “mourn ya ’til I join ya” style tattoo to commemorate a loss is a pretty good one, particularly for a split-second joke that the camera doesn’t linger on.

And speaking of Loki, I found Korg’s recap of Thor’s adventures at the top of the movie kinda pointless and self-insertive, but I really appreciated the straight-faced acknowledgement that Loki has died three times already now. That cues us to not take his death too seriously (or anyone’s, really), while poking fun at how often the MCU has gone to that well in Thor stories, and what a sweet sucker Thor is for continually falling for it and taking