So Taika Waititi’s Thor: Ragnarok was in a lot of ways my favorite Marvel movie to date, and I was hopeful that this one would be on that level, but alas, no.

The problem with it, I think, is that it’s trying to tell like 80% of Jason Aaron’s years-long run in the span of a single movie, which is just… a lot. So they do a credible job of Gorr the God Butcher, they do a half-assed job of Jane Foster as Thor (which requires like five bits of setup on its own, so barely has any time at all to breathe), and then they try to cram in like six other things, some of which are necessitated by MCU continuity — getting Thor out of the Guardians again, dealing with New Asgard, and setting up a whole-ass cosmogony.

It’s overstuffed, but precisely because it’s overstuffed, it ends up glancing over everything and feels too slight. To my preference, it also goes too hard on the comedy: I thought Ragnarok was great in taking this deadly-serious Thor mythology and having fun with it, but this one just went so broad that Thor is basically just a comic relief character now, with all his comedic traits dialed up to 11.

All that said… the movie still mostly works. Waititi is good at comedy, and we had some drinks before watching the movie, and so one particular running gag (the one that will be familiar to anyone who was on the internet a decade ago) kept cracking us up. And the Guns N’ Roses heavy soundtrack is p. much perfect.

The end result is mid-tier Marvel, which means that it’s perfectly suited for the “have some drinks and watch a dumb movie on streaming” spot that Netflix keeps aiming for and not managing to hit.