Jonathan L. Fischer

I realize I am allowing this film to slide under a very low bar. As the better Marvel films have shown, you need a lot more than zippy repartee to make a superhero film feel heartfelt and thematically resonant. And this one, despite its Whedon-y patches, is mostly a senses-assaulting mess, an offense to good taste as well as basic narrative cohesion.

Thor: Ragnarok is a much goofier film than its 2011 and 2013 predecessors, and also a better one.

This wouldn’t work if not for Holland, whose Peter Parker is the kind of self-conscious, quietly exceptional outer-borough teen without whom the entire concept of Spider-Man would sputter.

Its unthwartable tempo of quips, gags, cameos (Sly Stallone!), and loud noises rarely feels grating if only because of how loving it feels toward its characters and soundtrack, and how respectful it is toward the limits of its audience’s appetite for superheroic universe-building.

It is not a superhero flick as we have come to know the genre but a road movie and a Western, one that plays with the myth of the aging cowboy.

I suppose you could say the film made me slightly more likely to play one of the games, but only because I’d do just about anything before I saw this movie again.

To put it delicately, this comics fan hated Batman v Superman with the fury of a thousand red-dwarf suns. Blunt, humorless, and baffling, it collides the brutish directorial stamp of its director (he of 300 and Watchmen fame) with the most shameless instincts of our latter-day superhero franchise bubble.