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If 2017’s charming Thor: Ragnarok was like a shot in the arm to Marvel’s arguably least-vital franchise, then Love and Thunder is the ineluctable comedown, trying half-heartedly as its energy wanes to find a way to rejuvenate the old highs without any luck. Objectively no Marvel (or any) movie is very necessary; but after the pinnacles offered by Ragnarok and the ensuing Avengers films, which felt collectively like a satisfying-enough coda for the majority of its characters, Love and Thunder is an extended edition of unnecessary. It doesn’t work up the stamina to make the case that it’s a good thing we’re getting it; it’s a movie tacitly letting you know it knows it doesn’t have to try that hard because it’s going to make a billion dollars and keep Marvel’s engines oiled and purring anyway.

There is, naturally, a villain to be vanquished whose inevitable defeat is never doubted. His name is Gorr the God Butcher (Christian Bale, looking like Lord Voldemort post-nose transplant op), and he wields a cool-looking black blade with enough power to ensure he lives up to his pleasingly alliterative name. (Gorr wants to vengefully extinguish all the universe’s gods, and the worlds over which they preside, because years ago his daughter died and his people’s god laughed in his face about it.) Still recovering from the deaths of basically everyone who had been close to him in previous movies, Thor is joined for this latest, never-compelling battle by Ragnarok’s breakout warrior-woman character Valkyrie (Tessa Thompson) — who now runs New Asgard, the destroyed Asgard’s Norwegian do-over village and tourist attraction — and, in a callback to Thor: The Dark World (2013), old love interest Jane Foster (Natalie Portman).

Read the full column on 425.