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Birth.Movies.Death. (I skipped two paragraphs between these two here)
Thor: Ragnarok is the funniest Marvel movie to date. In fact, it may be the funniest superhero movie ever. From the first scene until the very last, it's a non-stop cavalcade of jokes wrapped around an epic, sweeping space adventure. The whole thing will make you absolutely giddy.
There's only one problem with the film being so funny and such a spectacle, though: The laughter and grandeur overshadows almost everything else. Ragnarok is missing the emotional core that has elevated many other Marvel films. The jokes and set pieces come at you so often that there's barely a moment for you to feel anything else. Luckily—and unlike so many other films that try the same thing—Thor: Ragnarok is so good it manages to work anyway.
Polygon
Ragnarok is a doodle notebook full of teenage daydreams, a neon-infused fantasy of what superhero films could look like. There are gigantic monsters and beautiful women; zombie armies and a big spooky dog; an evil witch and Jeff Goldblum, but this isn't just a wacky movie made for the sake of wackiness. Ragnarok is the child of confident filmmaking and understanding of what the Thor franchise could have always been.
Empire
Like a cosmic fever dream, Ragnarok is a disorientating cocktail of riotous colour and batty antics that seem almost unreal after the fact. Try to fit it into an established mould at your peril, but roll with this and you'll discover not only a top-tier addition to the MCU, but one of the most flat-out enjoyable comedies of the year.
Variety
Likethe previous two Thor solo movies, this one is pretty much skippable, although it's not without its pleasures — most notably, the fact that Thor's not so solo this time around, with cameos/co-starring opportunities for the Hulk, Doctor Strange and a few leftover bits of Tony Stark's wardrobe (including a retro Duran Duran T-shirt that's good for a laugh). And while it's not saying much, ”Thor: Ragnarok" is easily the best of the three Thor movies — or maybe I just think so because its screenwriters and I finally seem to agree on one thing: The Thor movies are preposterous.
The Hollywood Reporter
With Taika Waititi at the helm, the clash-of-worlds CGI extravaganza blasts free of the previous installment's leaden Dark World. Giant fire monsters in stygian underworlds notwithstanding, even the story's central bad guys are silly fun, hammed to the hilt by Cate Blanchett and Jeff Goldblum.
The relatively laidback angle on all the murderous spree-ing gives Chris Hemsworth a chance to find the comic groove beneath the title character's beefcake godliness. He does it expertly, and the self-mocking humor is all the more welcome given Thor's essential blandness. Even Anthony Hopkins' high-ground patriarch feels a tad looser, while Tom Hiddleston offers more of the seething sarcasm that makes Loki, with his ever-shifting allegiances, the best thing to happen to bad hair in the new millennium.
Telegraph
And of course there's more than enough ”Hulk Smash" to be going on with. The showpiece scrums here are as stylish as any in the Marvel canon, and come turbo-charged by Mark Mothersbaugh's score of Megadrive-ish crunches and bleeps. The greatest trick this studio wants to pull, at this point, is to make more of the same feel either exhilaratingly fresh, or sufficiently retro-inflected to qualify as a nostalgia trip. As both, Thor: Ragnarok counts as some kind of double peak.
IndieWire
While Marvel movies have contained flashes of humor since Robert Downey, Jr. first ran his mouth in ”Iron Man" — and yes, ”Guardians of the Galaxy" and its sequel are both boisterous joy rides in their own right — ”Thor: Ragnarok" never goes too long before landing another fresh punchline. That's a welcome change to this series-within-a-series, six years after Kenneth Branagh's sturdy ”Thor" gave the Norse god-turned-Avenger his first standalone. Chris Hemsworth has always carried a whiff of self-awareness about his muscular, hammer-toting hero through each new Marvel spectacle, but the humor often emerges from the way others react to his cartoonish masculinity; this time, he's in on the joke, his overconfidence leading the way as if he's absorbed some degree of Iron Man's charisma and filtered it through his own theatricality.
The Guardian
Fans will be satisfied at the most fleshed-out performance of Hulk we've yet had in this Marvel universe, though Mark Ruffalo is charmingly confused when he's being Bruce Banner. And rounding out the cast is Tessa Thompson, who turns up as a lapsed warrior from Thor's neck of the cosmos, which is a useful coincidence. There are a great many corners cut, plot holes papered over, and laws of physics bent out of recognition in this movie, to be honest. And if you've sat through the past dozen recent Marvel movies, you'll find the core elements very familiar – a rag-tag team of heroes (Thor unimaginatively dubs them ”the Revengers"), an all-powerful antagonist, an impending apocalypse, and a set of essentially un-killable characters. Added to which, the liberal use of CGI and green-screen makes for a visual flimsiness. Even the scenes set in ”Norway" look fake.
But Thor: Ragnarok gets away with all of this because it's so winningly, unpretentiously funny. It basically throws up its hands at its own ridiculousness and plays it all for laughs – and it gets them. The price of this irreverence is the possibility of taking anything that happens all that seriously – even the potential destruction of the Norse gods' home (that's not a spoiler either: it's the title of the movie). There's a potentially intriguing subtext about Asgard's gilded spires – and by extension European civilisation – having been built on the suffering and riches of others, but being a bit of a downer, it's dealt with fleetingly. The romp must go on.
ScreenCrush
The screenplay by Eric Pearson, Craig Kyle, and Christopher Yost has some sharp zingers, but most of the comedy comes from the delivery by actors like Tessa Thompson as Valkyrie, a warrior of Asgard turned disillusioned drunk, and Goldblum (who maybe improvised every single word he said? If you told me he never opened his script, I would believe you). Thor: Ragnarok runs a long two hours and 15 minutes, and features more subplots and characters than it needs — and that's before the obligatory (but narratively pointless) Marvel Cinematic Universe cameos. But the actors are all so good, and so are there performances, so it's easy to go along for the ride, even if the movie is sometimes as sloppy as an Asgardian thunder god after too many pints of mead.
Uproxx
Thor: Ragnarok is by far the most unusual of the Marvel movies – a crazy, colorful, ambitious, hilarious ride through the cosmos – even surpassing the Guardians of the Galaxy movies as the former holder of that title. And it's by far the funniest. It's not even a question that Thor: Ragnarok is the best of the Thor movies and it's certainly up there as far as the best in the MCU. Who knew a Thor movie could be this wonderful? I guess Taika Waititi did. And please let Taika Waititi make whatever other movies he wants from now on.
Entertainment Weekly
There's a lot more to the bloated story, but honestly, none of it is very interesting. In fact, it's endless. You don't care what's happening or what's going to happen next. We're just led from place to place for a hash of foggy reasons that no one will ever remember 10 minutes after leaving the theater. But that's not really the point of this movie. Ragnarok is basically a Joke Delivery System — and on that score, it works. The movie is fun. So to recap: Taika Waititi was mostly the right director for the job. Chris Hemsworth is hilarious. Tessa Thompson is going to be a star. And while Ragnarok's story is an aimless mess, you won't stop laughing. In other words, it's a... B
Birth.Movies.Death. (I skipped two paragraphs between these two here)
We mortals like to imagine that holding the fate of existence in your hands at all time is a burden, when the real world gods that strum the strings of the planet seem to be having a delightful time fiddling while Rome burns. I understand and appreciate that Thor means quite a bit to a lot of people, hence the Marvel version of this mythic character enduring through the decades, but I personally never got it. I imagine Taika Waititi didn't either, which is why he was able to make the best Thor movie ever by a wide margin.
If Thor isn't high-minded royal drama and it isn't gritty fantasy warfare, what the hell is it? The masterstroke of Thor: Ragnarok is realizing that Thor has always been the sore thumb that sticks out of the Marvel Cinematic Universe. He's regal, where the other characters are witty or sarcastic. He is the one character in the Avengers stable that isn't from Earth, so he's completely alien. Where the rest of them are vulnerable, he's a god. Thor: Ragnarok tears it all up and starts over.
