The Blacklist: Five Films I Hate That Everyone Else Loves

When I was a young lass with barely a handful of overreactions and needlessly capitalised opinions to call my own, I had a school teacher who offered me this sage advice when it came to debating: "Don't rant.  When you rant, we stop listening." Which - don't get me wrong - was all well and good within the confines of structured debating competitions largely dominated by chinless male adolescents whose sense of self-importance was directly proportional to how much they wished their voice would just drop already.*  But this is a blog, so sorry Mrs Edwards, I am going to rant my little digital socks off.

In summary, the following films are abominations and deserve to be fire-bombed out of existence.

The Jane Shakespeare Blacklist: Five Films I Utterly Loathe That Everyone Else Inexplicably Loves (and Obviously Contains Spoilers For Those Films)

Now look.  Most of the time, I get by ok despite being an emotionally neutered wasteland of a human being whose ability to respond appropriately to the adult world has been unalterably decimated by years of learning my life lessons from TV. I grew up reading books and then I went to university to read more books and realised that watching shitty children's films on the internet was much quicker and less effort. I feel more strongly about television about than I do about some actual human relationships (when I started watching Orange is the New Black, I genuinely think I was more psyched to spend time with my Netflix account than I was with my first boyfriend). What I'm saying is that I watch a lot of stuff, good and bad, so I don't usually judge others on their choices (in fact I detailed my love of crap TV here). However, there are a few films, just a few, that I loathe and every time I say I loathe them, someone looks at me like I just expressed indifference towards a Youtube video of an ocelot forming an unlikely friendship with a penguin.**  They're both small animals, I get why it's cute, I just...god, don't you people have anything better to do with your lives? You could be writing blogs justifying your deep-seated aggression towards humanity. Anyway, here they are.

5) Titanic

Now this is an obvious choice to kick things off and maybe kind of a cheat because actually there are a lot of people that don't love it. It's just that the people who love it really love it. And I hate those people. I've also never actually seen it all the way through. I just can't. Every time it comes on TV, I think, “This time, this time, I will respond to this film that makes people cry their innards out through their noses.” And every time I have to stop watching because I can feel bile rising in my throat at the first few strains of that Celine Dion wankfestival of over-literal interpretation of the concept of undying love. It brings out the absolute worst in me. It only takes a few minutes and I'm treating human tragedy like it's the funniest thing I've ever seen (cf also: Forrest Gump). Also obligatory mention of get on the fucking door.

4) The Lion King

This is potentially where I lose some friends.  But actually let's be clear.  I do not hate The Lion King.  But I am happily indifferent to The Lion King.  But the world, as always, will not let me be.  "How can you not like The Lion King?" they gasp, as though I have expressed a neutrality towards breathing oxygen, and that incredulity has pushed me dangerously towards hatred.  Easily, is the answer.  Bloody easily.  Anthropomorphism has never been my thing, not ever, and when I watched Bambi as a kid I asked my mum whether Bambi's mum had just been shot and she nodded sadly with soft, compassionate motherly eyes ready to leap to the rescue of my tender psyche and I said "oh ok" and went back to wondering what exactly his dad had been doing all that time.  Nature is not cuddly, it is red in tooth and claw, and it will thank you for showing some respect (I mean you Ang Lee). Also if I want to read Hamlet I will definitely just read Hamlet.  So let me be, in my joyless, loveless bubble.  I'm not telling you not to enjoy it but I will not pretend I enjoy it either.  I am the Andy Murray of film watching, refusing to smile, and winning at Twitter.

3) 500 Days of Summer

I have been told so many times by so many folk that I just didn't "get" this film.  No, you see, it is a deconstruction of the Manic Pixie Dream Girl trope, the magical quirky girl who pinwheels into the life of the male protagonist and heals his damaged first world soul, it is a warning against projecting unmanageable expectations onto someone.  Is what they say.  Well, no.  Is what I say.  Because a) if that were true, why is the last thing we see in the film Joseph Gordon Levitt hitting on an identical woman (Zooey Deschanel just wasn't the right Manic Pixie Dream Girl! Keep searching, entitled white boy, there's a Manic Pixie Dream Girl out there for you too!) and b) even if the film was pointing out the folly of their relationship, so what?  The idea that putting women on a pedestal ends badly is not a blinding revelation.  I think most of us do not need a film to tell us that you cannot build a lasting relationship on shared love of The Smiths.

It is not a deconstruction of the trope because it does nothing to deconstruct the trope.  The story is still told from the viewpoint of the aforementioned lost boy who pursues a woman because she symbolises a meaningful existence and ultimately 'wins' her, despite her free-wheelin' ways and initial reluctance.  The fact that he loses her again means nothing for, as the film makes clear, he will do this again and again and again.  A deconstruction would tell her story, show her agency and inner life rather than just informing us that she totally has them, and focus on her choices because of what they mean for her, not as and when they affect him.  In the end, it still reinforces the stereotype that women's lives are plot points in men's stories.  No amount of non-linear storytelling and cutesy Expectations v Reality set pieces can disguise that.  It's hollow, it's twee, and it challenges nothing.  Mic drop.

2) Juno

It is not the miracle of central heating or the tender embrace of a lover that keeps me warm at night, it is my hatred of this film.  It nourishes my soul.  It gives me energy.  Why?  Because it's fucking annoying.  Basically.  But oh, such annoyance.  My intolerance of this film is nigh on Biblical.  The smug Dr Seuss dialogue, the lazy mumblecore performances, the appalling manner in which Michael Cera continues to exist, the vicious desperate straining towards being alternative (and yet at the same time so painfully afraid of offending anyone - no it's totally cool that you support abortion! It's just not for our did-we-mention-ADHD-but-not-in-a-way-that-is-ever-really-represented-as-anything-other-than-edearing-in-an-offbeat-way heroine!  Oh, and by the way, all abortion clinic picketers are also quirky and adorable!).  At no point does this film celebrate anything difficult or unusual or uncomfortable (spoilers: the baby ends up with sweetly middle class Jennifer Garner, bad Jason Bateman with his ephebophile tendencies is banished, and Ellen Page goes to the prom with Michael Cera, the poor, poor girl) and it pretends it does because it comes packaged in The Moldy Peaches***, ironic euphemisms for penises, and a fucking hamburger phone.  I really hate that fucking hamburger phone.

1) Love Actually

Ok, this is it.  The big one.  I don't want to overreact here but everyone involved in this film deserves to be put up against a wall and shot.  Even you Colin Firth.  Especially you, for trying to trade off against Darcy goodwill by jumping into a lake.  Every character in it is a borderline horrendous sociopath and every one of its hoard of dead-eyed paycheck-visualising actors has done a better performance than this at some other point in their careers, and for Kris Marshall, it was his mugshot when he was arrested for drunk driving.  This film goes out of its way to tell you that any option - literally any option - is better than just talking to a woman.  Hold up passive aggressive placards about how your entire existence has been destroyed by a woman having the temerity to marry someone else, learn to play the drums, buy a woman on the white slave trade market, decide you have no future together because she committed the heinous crime of electing to look after her brother instead of having sex with you, offer to have her ex boyfriends killed because they called her fat (because no woman of yours will bear the shame of being called fat) but for the sake of all that is holy, do not simply talk to her about your feelings, she will not respond to your simply and sincerely expressed feelings.

Oh Gentle Reader, I cannot truly express to you the depths of my antagonism towards this film.  I hate it with the gnawing, churning, all consuming darkness of a black hole, and were I possessed of ungodly  reality-altering powers, I would rip it out of existence itself and send it spitting and cursing back into the howling chasm from whence it came.  I hate the way, the truly tragic way, it takes actors that I like - Laura Linney! Andrew Lincoln!  forever to me to the most perfectly cast Edgar Linton there ever shall be, decent and strong-jawed and faithful! - and buckles them into this devil spawn of a roller coaster ride to hell.  Oh, I am sorry Linney, Lincoln, Firth, Ejiofor, Freeman and company (Not you, Knightley.  Never you.) but I cannot forgive your presence in this cynical money sink of a film (that does not - has never - really believed that love is, actually, all around but knows that you will believe it for long enough in your wine-addled Yuletide fugue of loneliness and existential despair to rent it off LoveFilm or add to the royalties by watching it on repeat) on the basis of previous and subsequent good form.

And the turtlenecks.  Dear weeping Jesus on a two-wheeled canoe, the fucking turtlenecks.


*I was actually really good at debate.  I once did a public speaking contest where they invented a prize to give me because I had written my speech the day before and not followed any of the rules about structure or having an actual argument but was apparently "utterly charming". But I am fucking charming, so you know.
**Actually that does sound fucking adorable.
***Who I liked before this film, goddammit.


A/N: Bonus Extra Episode of a TV Show I Hate That Everyone Else Loves, Incidentally Also Written by Richard Curtis: Vincent and the Doctor (Doctor Who, Series 5, Episode 10)

Snow Patrol is just the tip of the appallingly twee iceberg here.  No one - no one - can straight-facedly call someone "my friend" in continuous prose and not sound like a twat.  Just - just go and watch it again, and this time listen to the dialogue.  Consider the incredible crassness of the metaphor of Vincent van Gogh being haunted by an "invisible monster" (DEPRESSION THE REAL MONSTER IS DEPRESSION).  And ask yourself whether you actually thought it was good, or whether you just felt like you should because Matt Smith and Bill Nighy compared their bow ties.

(IT'S ABOUT DEPRESSION.)

Very Boys Such Bromance Wow So Unlikely Alliances Much Cheekbone Part 2: The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug

2013: Year of the Colon.

So basically I'm linking together Thor and The Hobbit and Sherlock (forthcoming in Part 3) because they are all such utter sausage-fests about the manly bonds between manly men and why would you think we're gay we're not gay and maybe we should get a new joke for this show, Stephen Moffat.  It's particularly noticeable to me right now because I've been watching Battlestar Galactica again and I have to say, actual realistic representation of women as fifty percent of the population never felt so good. I watched a scene today where three politicians discussed the impact that a particular issue would have on an upcoming election and they were all women and nobody commented on it. I nearly wept.  Anyway, I really enjoyed The Hobbit but Middle Earth sure has been struck by some tragic ovary-targeting wasting disease.

The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug: Review: I Knew Aidan Turner Was In It For A Reason

So on the whole, it was a ton of fun.  It has the same flaws as the first film, only bigger, and the same strengths as the first film, only bigger.  It's bigger.  Is what I'm saying.  It also has that Middle-of-a-Trilogy-itis thing where the director gets excited by not really having introduce anything or tie anything up so it's all action, bitches, because it's 2013 (well, it was) and that's what we like, amIright? This is a good thing or a bad thing depending on your tastes - some of the action sequences are epic and beautiful and brilliant and so much wow (the dwarves going all Home Alone on Smaug and DON'T FUCKING TALK TO ME ABOUT THE SPEED THAT GOLD MELTS AT BECAUSE THEY'RE FIGHTING A DRAGON AND THIS IS YOUR BEEF) and some were sort of 'ok so this is still happening' (endless chases through Laketown, endless). 

Like the first film, it's a big, heavy juggernaut and it takes a while to get going and it stutters and chokes a little bit to begin with but then heave-ho, everyone puts their shoulders to the wheel and suddenly its weight is helping it gather momentum and oh wait, I am really enjoying this film, whoosh dragons molten tacky gold dwarf statues fabulous elves OH IT'S OVER.  Which was also exactly like the first film.  But also like the first film, it revels in the delight of this being a familiar universe, deftly balancing new elements with old favourites. Wisely, it doesn't dwell too much on episodes like Beorn's house because it knows that we know - and it knows that we know that it knows - that Mirkwood is just around the corner and that can mean only one thing.

Hey baby.  It's been a while.

Legolas: still sexy.  Still confused as fuck.  What's going on? Who are we fighting now? Legolas doesn't care.  He's going to stand on the heads of two dwarves in barrels and shoot arrows from his seemingly infinite quiver because he literally has no other clue about what he should be doing right now and the soundtrack in his head is going "dun dun dun LEGOLAS dundunnnn".

Stumbling in the direction of something more serious, the Mirkwood elves are a perfect example of what the film does right: "less wise and more dangerous" is how they're described, and it takes everything we love about elves (shiny) and invests it with personality and flaws and other tasty and sumptuous things.  I mean, man, these elves are such bitches.  We always suspected it and we were right.  They are the Regina Georges of Middle Earth.  Take Thranduil, for example.  All he wants to do is just comb his hair because what if it gets a kink in it, and then it won't go with his glittery mini-antlers and god Legolas, daddy is busy right now with his straighteners and for the last time Tauriel, the order of precedence goes Picking Up Robes from Dry Cleaner, Booking Facial, Giant Spider Attack in that order.  If you couldn't tell, Thranduil is my new favourite character.

Sorry, we were being serious.  For me the elves worked particularly well because book-universe-wise, there is nothing to say this wasn't going on, it's a logical extension of the Mirkwood plot, and film-universe-wise, we didn't really get to see communities of other races in Lord of the Rings, just societies of humans and the tagalong duds the other races sent along ("yes Legolas, it is a very special and important mission and you should on no account try to call or write and really, stay away as long as you need to").  If the mission statement behind fleshing one small book into three films is to deliver a richer and more complex universe as a reward for investing our time in it, then showing us not only a community of elves but a community of elves that is specifically different from other elves and have their own customs and hang-ups is a very good use of time and resources.  And now I have to stop typing "community of elves" as I can no longer keep a straight face.

But as well as the excitement of meeting new characters and catching up with old ones, what really made the film worth it for me was the plethora of little moments that just flicked out the paintbrush and added a little more dimension to the cast of fantasy archetypes.  Nearly every character gets one, which is just a nice reassurance that Peter Jackson knows what he's doing as a storyteller and - moreover - has probably spent more time immersed in the Tolkien universe than anyone else ever and really actually deserves to take The Hobbit and spin it into three films of (let's face it) ultimate nerdy self-indulgence.  My favourite of these little moments has to be Legolas literally being so hugged so hard by one of the Big End of Level Boss Orcs that he nosebleeds (well, we've all had that urge).  It's great because, again, it fits with the expanded view of these new flawed, impulsive, human-like elves and along with Thranduil's magicked-away dragon-flamed face (he must get through a lot of concealer) it suggests that actually elven beauty is a very important external symbol of immortality and imperviousness to the passage of time and how elves are a race apart, standing outside the natural ebb and flow of things, but basically also because my viewing companion and I showed our age and simultaneously went "You made me bleed my own blood!"*  And after a cursory google, I found that half the internet thought the same thing, so, Orlando Bloom: bringing people together through looking confused and outraged since 2001.

Speaking of new characters, I don't think anyone was a disappointment. I'm also just not sure how absolutely necessary Stephen Fry as the Master of Clumsy Social Commentary on Good Governance was but hey, it was still all super-delightful in its way.  Bard the Bowman** and his Adorable Children were all you could ask for in the way of good, decent, not terribly interesting salt of the earth folk, even if I did spend much of their scenes going, "Why is Bard the Bowman also sometimes Orlando Bloom but maybe also Welsh?"  He's not though, it's Luke Evans, and he is definitely Welsh.  Maybe.  I mean, his kids were.  But why they emigrated from Wales to Middle Earth, I couldn't tell you.  As a side note, a friend of mine described him as "bang tidy", a phrase which - regardless of whether or not I agree with its application in this particular instance - surely deserves more exposure.  Bang tidy. Hee.

And, of course, everyone is getting their robes in a twist over the inclusion of a character who - gasp -isn't even in the book (Deviations from the source material! Imagine!) and who is - double gasp - a lady.  Well let's all just unclench because Tauriel was basically pretty great and a very welcome addition to the series.  The problem, of course, starts when female characters have to represent their entire gender because they are the only female character in the whole thing and in this respect it would be very easy to bitch about the only significant female character in the film being shoved into a love triangle of sorts*** but you know what? Eh.  Besides, it must require a lot of fortitude being an elf lady in love with a dwarf dude, it is basically like Romeo and Juliet with an added height difference.  I mean, the romance plot was obviously horribly executed, it must be said, and happened in about five minutes flat and everyone was bandying the word 'love' around after a single conversation about the relative descriptors for starlight (dwarf chat up lines, ring a ding ding) but Tauriel as a character, on her own, was boss.  I'm not hugely bummed about the film introducing this warrior-lady and then shoving her into a romance plot as she also had agency and strengths and other stuff going on, whereas ironically it was at this point I went "oh so that's why they cast Aidan Turner" because Kili really was basically there to be dwarf totty.  I was a bit sad that his bromance with Fili wasn't so in evidence but this was also the time at which the film chose to take a firm stance on that particular relationship and went with "definitely brothers, however you may interpret Fili choosing to stay behind with his dying bro instead of going on the adventure of a lifetime to the mountain he has literally been waiting to see for his entire life".  Oh shit, I've just remembered how The Hobbit ends. Oh, fuck you, Peter Jackson.

Martin Freeman and Richard Armitage continued to rom-com it as Bilbo and Thorin, with Smaug as the conniving ex ("oh you think he's into you but you just try and get him to commit, there is no way he's coming all the way down here to save you").  Less smouldering for Thorin this time and more "slow descent into madness" but that sounds like a recipe for brooding to me, so I'm still happy.  Also it must be said that while his plan to get rid of Smaug was flawlessly executed, it was also dumb as shit. Oh Thorin, he has fire literally inside him, all you did was make him more bling.  Also was there just a giant gold dwarf statue hanging around and they melted it? Or - even weirder - a mould for giant gold dwarf statues because they were in such hot demand back in the day? Yeah, that was strange. 

La la la, a quick rundown of the rest because I think you can tell by now that I liked the film and just want to make affectionate sarky comments about it.  Benedict Cumberdragon was on good form, particularly the "I like you" line, a thought which I finished as "In another life, I feel like maybe we could have lived in a flat together and solved crimes."**** The problem is that while his voice is awesome and dragon-y and villainous, he's also - in my mind - clearly actually the nicest guy in the world which kind of confused me about Smaug so I came out of the film thinking of him as that friend who you all know is kind of an arsehole but then, like, he's got a big house and loads of cool shit and he's a bit lonely, and really his douchebaggery just mostly makes you laugh and he only sometimes tries to incinerate you. I actually could have watched Smaug and Bilbo chinwag all day and it was half the movie as it was.  Loved Smaug's design too, that slightly Keira Knightley-esque amount of jaw really putting the smug in Smaug (yeah, SORRY NOT SORRY).

What else? Gandalf, yes, cool, great.  He should be nicer to Radagast, though, since something tragic is clearly going to occur to explain his absence in LOTR.  Also, actual magic! I feel like up to this point wizard-magic in the LOTR universe has been more along the lines of New Age positive thinking and supreme good luck.  I mean, Voldemort would be all up in Gandalf's grill and Gandalf would be all "it is small acts and small people who stand against the dark" and Voldemort would like "Bitch be trippin', I'mma AK that shit."  I'm sorry, I've also been watching a lot of Orange is the New Black lately.

So yeah.  In summary, I couldn't take any of it seriously, not for a moment - but in the best possible way.  It's all so dear and familiar, it basically feels like a constant stream of in-jokes, heightened to increasingly ridiculous levels, and even when it's slow or clumsy, I just - oh, Lord of the Rings universe, I can't stay mad at you.  I just can't.  I'm not sure I'll pay to see it again but when it crops up on Netflix in six months time, I will most definitely grab a bottle of cornershop plonk and be glad to make its reacquaintance.

*If that's the wording you thought in, you're referencing The Simpsons, congratulations.  If, on the other hand, you thought "Nobody makes me bleed my own blood!", you are referencing Dodgeball and might be still in your teens, and also Blades of Glory is the far superior work of that particular cinematic movement. 

**Incidentally, Bard the Bowman is the character that I assumed Richard Armitage had been cast as when I first heard he was going to be in it.  I hadn't read the book for a good fifteen years and filtering amongst my hazy watercolour recollections of it, my brain clearly felt that 'heroic lost prince man who slays dragon' was a better fit for him than 'slightly pompous and kind of useless dwarf king'.

***Personally, I feel like the inclusion of an elf v dwarf love triangle is just Peter Jackson sticking two fingers up at Twilight, but that could just be wishful thinking.
****To be discussed in rabid, devoted detail in Part 3 - coming soon! Actually soon, not 'half a year' soon.

Very Boys Such Bromance Wow So Unlikely Alliances Much Cheekbone Part 1: Thor: The Dark World

Blimey, it's been a while, eh?  Not to worry, adulthood hasn't got me yet.  If you're wondering why I've decided to title this three-part blog post* with a variant on 2013's strangest yet most persistent meme, it's because these three works of media degraded my ability to think in full sentences to about that level.  Really.

...

Thor: The Dark World: Review: Basically I'm Reviewing Loki: Just Loki: Where Do I Stop Putting Colons

Ok. So. I'm going to preface this review by saying that when I saw the film, I was suffering under the combination of having just said farewell to a supremely lovely cast of actors on an excellent production I'd been working on for a few months, and that farewell came in the form of excessive drinking and very little sleep, so my emotions were already dancing a merry dance all over my nervous system. The result of this was that when the film finished, my immediate instinct was to go and light up a cigarette that can only be described as post-coital. I collapsed, limbs splayed in my cinema seat, hyperventilating with the sheer force of ALL MY FUCKING FEELINGS.

And then I snapped out of it and remembered the first half of the film. Because the first half of the film is, frankly, dull as fuck. It starts ok (gratuitous crotch shot of Loki) and then just kind of stops (very little Loki until halfway through and then it's All Loki All The Time).  And for once in my life, I'm not just being a fangirl (I said not just being a fangirl). Basically, there's not enough Loki to make this film deliver on its promises. It was marketed as 'Thor must ask Loki for help, angst ensues' and that's just not really what it is. Tom Hiddleston has been walking the earth like the Wandering Jew with cheekbones, to promote a film that he's barely in.

To be honest with you, I don't even remember that much of the first half (something about Christopher Eccleston's career not quite panning how he expected) and awkward segues into comic interludes, mostly courtesy of Kat Dennings as Darcy, though even her infallible ability to be deadpan and awesome seems strained in the odd, tired energy of the events. There's also a cameo appearance from Chris O'Dowd, going on a date with Natalie Portman and let's all back the fuck up and read that again because CHRIS O'DOWD WHAT ARE YOU DOING ON A DATE WITH NATALIE PORTMAN GET BACK TO THE BASEMENT. So there are more jokes than the first film but none of the effortless delight of, say, Thor walking into a pet shop and demanding a horse. In fact, there are actually too many jokes to sit comfortably with the amped-up grit factor and the tone lurches drunkenly all over the place from the sublime to the ridiculous and back again via a rainbow bridge**.

Part of this is the criminally under explored villain, when the film can actually decide who the main antagonist is - Malekith or Loki.  If the rumours are true that a bunch of Malekith's stuff was bumped from the film to make way for Loki, then it raises the horrifying possibility that Tom Hiddleston's original role in the film was confined to maybe just one eyebrow raise and that is a world that I want no part in.  I am disappointed in the disservice done to both Chris Ecclestone and his character, not least because when they announced him I spent two days in a sort of glee-coma unable to say anything except repeat, "Malekith the Accursed.  Dark elf.  Christopher Ecclestone." But things were always going to be difficult post-Avengers. The first Thor had the advantage of being largely encapsulated in its own universe, the action confined to the remote realms of Asgard and New Mexico. Now the Marvel Cinematic Universe's internal public is aware of superheroes, the threat level has to be very finely judged for solo outings because otherwise just, like, call the other Avengers, y'know? And frankly, all the known universes collapsing in Greenwich kind of seems like at least an equivalent level of threat to a leather clad sociopath letting aliens on flying bikes into New York. But whatever, maybe Bruce Banner was on holiday. 

And I suppose things were also always going to be difficult in terms of how to write Loki. After going gloriously and hammily full villain in The Avengers, giving him any kind of arc must necessitate a little backtracking - bringing him home is a start (and let's not forget the moment in The Avengers when Thor tells him he can stop and come home and goddamit it, you can see in his eyes that that would actually maybe be really nice were it not for the whole attempted genocide and mass murder blips) but in The Dark World, it's just done in far too broad brush strokes. This is where the lack of Loki becomes problematic. There's not enough time to make this film what it deserves to be, which is Thor-and-Loki-go-to-family-counselling. I'm not quite sure that the MCU appreciates what it has in Hemsworth and Hiddleston, which is a few dozen gallons of heartbreak and an effortless chemistry. This film feels like it was written for lesser actors, ironed out into Hero and Villain, and yet the Brodinsons of Sassgard*** run away with every scene they're given (in Loki's case, cackling). Hiddleston's least subtle character elicits, weirdly, his most subtle performance,**** doing more acting with his eyes in one scene than there is in the rest of the film combined, and Hemsworth leads the film with lovely sincerity, retaining the streak of self-effacing humour brought out in The Avengers (I mean, thank all the Nordic gods, because the lack thereof in the first film was what sent me running into Loki's mad arms in the first place).

The fact is, the greatest superpower any of these films possess is humanity - that's what gives us the hook to keep us coming back, and is also why Superman movies are doomed to fail in comparison.  Tony Stark has his inner demons, Bruce Banner has his rage issues, Steve Rogers is a good man in a bewilderingly and increasingly complicated world, and Thor has a dysfunctional family. It's even ironic, maybe, that the most ridiculous Avenger (space-god-thing-with-science-magic) has the most affecting and, dare I say it, relatable backstory. Not so much with the frost giants, obviously, but the fuck-up sibling and the inability to ever really give up on family when they're threatening to take over the world that your signifiant other lives on, well, we've all been there.

Or maybe at this point Hiddleston's popularity with the fan base is just becoming a hindrance to writing a well balanced story.  I mean, there's a right way and a wrong way to love Loki. The right way is to appreciate him for the magnificent bastard he is, in which case you probably like Avengers Loki best, slasher smile, death metal hair, eye-ripping and everything. And there's the wrong way, which is to watch him whilst silently keening "MY BABY YOU JUST NEED A HUG", in which case you probably like him best in the first film, all wobbly bottom lip and palpable and justified sense of betrayal. (I'm somewhere in between the two, since you ask, feeling somewhat relieved at the last second reveal of him finally sitting on the throne of Asgard, with a moment of "oh thank god, that's my clever little psychopath", but far far too many moments of "JUST LET YOUR RIPPLING BLOND BROTHER SAVE YOU WITH HIS LOVE" for me to be entirely comfortable with myself. It is not, after all, a million miles away from "he just gets tense when he's trying to usurp a throne, he loves me really!")

This film was stuck between the two, flirting with both sides enough to be really really frustrating but not nearly enough to be satisfying. What we want, I suspect, is for Loki to be - like any good trickster figure - consistently and ambiguously using his emotions for his own gain. Like Sherlock. Or Artemis Fowl. Or - Loki's classical ancestor - Edmund in King Lear. We want a conman who is always ultimately up to something but in the moments when he displays vulnerability, left wondering whether it was all an act or possibly, maybe just a little bit sincere. We were almost there with this film. His 'death' is a particularly egregious example - the redemption, the regret, it should have been a Type 2 Loki fan's wet dream (and also how I was predicting they would write him out of the franchise). But there just wasn't time to process it. The quick cut to the gags about Chris O'Dowd and Thor hanging his hammer on the coat rack undermined it so quickly that there was no way he was really dead. Similarly, perhaps showing Loki's lonely displays of grief over Frigga's death (Frigga, my thoughts in brief: wow someone had some awesome in their coffee this morning, oh wait look she's dead in order to further the character development of the male protagonists, colour me shocked) would have made the later bluff too obvious, but it was obvious anyway because this film took a fond farewell of subtlety in the opening credits, so lingering just a little bit longer on him blowing stuff up with his mind would have been an infinitely more satisfying exploration of character.  That, in the end, was the core disappointment - everything was undercut so swiftly that you hardly knew how to feel about any of it (ambiguity is great, confusion is not). We're invested in these characters now, and not for the big explosions. Iron Man 3 was a darkly sincere look at the individual, not the costume. The Thor story should be an obvious contender for this type of treatment and yet became something so much less than the sum of its parts.

Look, it's not all bad. It was worth the ticket price for Hemsworth and Hiddleston alone, frankly. From the moment they Reservoir Dogs their way down the halls of Asgard, through the chase on the spaceship ("Well don't hit it, just press it gently." "I AM PRESSING IT GENTLY.") to Loki's deadpan "Ta-da" upon emerging into Vanaheim, the central section of the film is a pure joy. And, crucially, it's set us up for a Thor 3 in which the action is Thor-Loki centric, and me being the eternal optimist that I am, I'm going to hope for all the bickering, sparring, betrayal, game playing, double bluffs and tentative reconciliations we were promised this time. And after all, Loki essentially won this one. I can't really hate that. So until then I'm going to wait for the DVD and play a specific twenty minutes of it nonstop until my laptop breaks (cf also: War Horse) or Gotterdamerung occurs.  Whichever happens first.


*THREE PARTS.  Seriously though.
**A mysterious repaired rainbow bridge - how? It was a massive deal that Thor couldn't go and see Natalie Portman at the end of the first film and there was a shoehorned-in mumble about dark energy in The Avengers and now it sort of turns out that, basically, Asgard engineers totally could have done it, no problem, but the thing is, like, union stuff, and also they'll need to get some parts in.
***Kudos for this outstanding piece of wordplay goes to my colleague, Kate. Good writers imitate, great writers steal etc etc.
****No seriously.  Go and watch his other stuff and tell me he doesn't bring unnecessary melodrama to more conventionally written roles.  Then watch Thor again and tell me why and how he's finding deft emotional complexity in Giggling Space Despot.