Your Thumb Hit By The Hammer Of The God

Let's just say that at first blush, I'm not too terribly disappointed with the appearance of the cast, save what could possibly be the woman who will obviously the love interest. Not that Natalie Portman isn't a semi-decent actress, it's just that.............

..............just watch.



All the key players are there: Thor, Odin, Loki, Volstagg.

My only issue with this was that Kenneth Branagh was seated comfortably in the director's chair on this one. He pretty much turned Frankenstein into an overly stylized version of the most juicy bits of Mary Shelly's magnum opus, so I'm sure that with the advent of special effects in the modern Hollywood realm he's done the same here. Hell, just look at the trailer.

Then again, trailers are normally farmed out to production houses that do nothing but take the best bits of existing material to make a film look far cooler than it actually is. I thought that Bad Company just might be a genre busting film. After all, Anthony Hopkins AND Chris Rock - what could go wrong.

Oh, wait, this movie has Tony in it too. Fuck.

And while some critics, both professional and non, will claim that Marvel is scraping the bottom of the barrel at this point, I have to maintain that I have loved Thor since I was in grade school. Of course, his storyline became much grittier and hard edged during the last 12 years, but I'm not expecting to see that from Branagh's "vision" of the film.

When it comes to comic adaptations, one has to look more at the writer(s) than the director. At this point, we need to be worried.

The writing team's resume includes such cinematic masterpieces as:

Agent Cody Banks and Fantastic 4: Rise Of The Silver Surfer.

There's really no saving grace to the writing or initial story process of this film, even though one of the guys did work on Babylon 5.

Unfortunately, this will more than likely be a film to wait to get at your local Redbox machine or stream live from Netflix.