Okaaaaaaay…This is obviously NOT the recent Marvel theatrical release called ‘Thor’. ‘Almighty Thor’ painfully and shamelessly tries to cash in on the name. It’s very rare that I get to say that 1987’s ‘Masters of the Universe’ is a better film, but in this case it’s better in every way: story, acting, music, directing…everything. When I sat down to watch ‘Almighty Thor’, I was hoping for, at best, a fun knock-off with some cool elements. Then I saw that that the Director’s last name was from the “Olen Ray” family and I shuddered. I was immediately reminded of his dad’s HUGE history of schlock such as ‘Alien Dead’, ‘Biohazard’, and ‘Evil Toons’. My son asked me why having the name was so bad, and I just stated that the apple probably wouldn’t have fallen far from the tree…
Unfortunately, I was right. ‘Almighty Thor’ doesn’t even try to copy the Marvel property. It’s as if the producers had just thought of cashing in on the name last month and slapped together a film to ride the real ‘Thor’s’ coattails. Cody Deal, who’s famous for playing the Roman Soldier at Ceasar’s Palace in the film ‘The Hangover’ (…uhm…what?), plays the title character and looks like he just came from an all night-frat party and pretty much partied away all his brain cells the night before. Richard Grieco… man, what the heck happened to Richard Grieco? We all thought he was going
to be a breakaway star from ’21 Jump Street’. That never happened, and now he looks like a cross between Edward Scissorhands and Charlie Sheen, with a Chicago accent. He plays Loki. Yep, Loki.
Okay, long story short: Asgard looks surprisingly like Medieval Earth, and Loki (a demon here) is laying waste to armies, looking for the mystical Hammer of Invincibility so he can destroy the Tree of Life and bring about Ragnarok. Odin (sans eye patch, but who has the Hammer) and his sons Baldir and Thor, trudge to the cave of the Fates, who have summoned Odin. They basically tell him he’s screwed, so he and his dopes rush off to avoid Loki. Loki catches up to them and tricks Odin into killing Baldir. Then he sneaks up behind Odin, slaying him, but not before Odin can send the Hammer through a portal. From there, it’s the whole “Thor’s gotta go on a journey to find the Hammer and protect the Tree of Life from Loki, but be meets a Hispanic Norse babe with an ugly face and an Italian accent who seems to have all the plot knowledge we’ll need, but then they go to Earth to find the Hammer, but no funny things happen on Earth except Thor gets to shoot guns…” and so on and so on. The acting here is worse than a grade school pageant. Was all the supporting cast simply friends of the director? Even though Grieco’s supposedly a good actor, he can’t pull off Loki AT ALL! I doubt he was even wearing makeup, I think he was just on a cocaine bender.
Cody Deal channels his inner Reb Brown here, trying to act as if he were acting. He fails miserably. Every delivery of his lines is laughable to the point where you actually feel bad for him. At least Ashton Kutcher’s Kelso was a CHARACTER!! This guy is genuinely dumb as a bag of hammers (pun firmly intended). Thor wears sheepskin sweatpants, and has cape that, when he wears a trench coat, mysteriously disappears from around his neck, only to reappear just before he removes the coat to reveal his cape. When he meets the ugly, plot-knowledgeable chick, he
says, “I’m Thor!” It almost sounds, if he had a lisp, that he were saying he was “sore”. When they encounter a wall, blocking a mystic portal, he intelligently declares that “it’s a wall”. When they walk down the cave entrance to theTree of Life, the chick (It’s not even worth looking up her character’s name. Really) tells him that she’s GOT to go with him because if he dies, all is lost. Then, five feet later, they reach the portal and she tells him that he must go on his own from here on in. WTF??? The hot warrior chick from the Power Rangers movie was much more pretty and believable than Patricia Velasquez’s character.
Grieco walks around, repeating his lines. Sometimes it’s the same shot of him over and over, sometimes it’s a new shot with the same background (did they only have a permit to shoot in 3 locations for this film?). Grieco really looks like he’s slumming here. He probably needed the money he made on the film to buy a bottle of Ripple. Loki walks down the streets of (presumably) modern-day Los Angeles, and not ONE funny thing happens to him!! Someone gives him a weird look, and that’s it! It would have been hilarious if he walked past a comic convention or something. Or walked into a store or bar and all the hijinks that go along with “fish out of water” scenarios. Nope. Nothing like that here.
Thor is so amazingly dumb in this movie that I’m pretty sure, dumb people are going to rally a protest against it, and
sue for defamation. He “taught himself to fight by watching his brother practice when he was a child”! When he says to the chick, “Why is everything I do wrong?” you KNOW she wants to say, “Because you’re a DOLT?!?” But, alas, she plays it straight. Okay, the music was the highlight of the film (although the music in “Masters of the Universe” FAR surpasses this soundtrack). Some of the special effects were good, and some were rib-ticklingly funny. Now, I’m no expert on made-for-SyFy movies, but in the end scene where Loki tries to destroy the world, I swear some of the FX shots were used in other SyFy films… hmm…. Sounds like an Olen Ray family tradition!
I really feel badly taking up any more of the readers’ time about this film. Thor makes Arnold’s Conan look like a member of MENSA. There was clearly no fight choreographer in this film, as all the fights were in slo-mo, so there was no danger of the actors actually hurting themselves. All in all, the best thing I can say about this movie is that it’s still not as bad as ‘Highlander 2’. Go see the real thing and forget you ever read this review. Sorry I wasted your time.
