It’s hard to know where to start in reviewing Thor: Love and Thunder. The movie feels like several movies in one—there’s the standard Marvel superhero fare, there’s a rousing adventure for kids about being your own savior, there’s a touching and emotionally mature love story, and there’s the film about a villain so steeped in self-righteous nihilism he’s out to prove that God is dead by killing all the Gods. There’s so much happening here that it’s hard to not get some whiplash, and the plot threads binding it all together don’t hold up to much scrutiny. This is, however, a Taika Waititi movie more than anything else, which means it’s more than worth the trip, and we can rest assured that Thor: Love and Thunder, the singular product from all these moving parts, is deeply funny and lovely to look at.

Waititi, who directed and co-wrote Love and Thunder, is responsible—along with star Chris Hemsworth—for giving Thor an entirely new lease on life. The MCU never seemed to really know what to do with the strapping space viking, even though his successful origin story, Thor (2011), helped kick off the Marvel universe as we know it today. In contrast to Thor’s troublemaking brother Loki (Tom Hiddleston), who was such a breakout hit from that film that he became the main antagonist in The Avengers and a firm fan favorite, characterization for Thor remained stilted. It felt like Marvel’s writers and directors couldn’t decide if they wanted him speaking like “Shakespeare in the Park,” to paraphrase Tony Stark, or a sort of dim bulb fish perpetually out of water. Then the narrative misfire of Thor: The Dark World bogged down the Thorverse characters, not to mention whatever Thor’s up to in Age of Ultron. It was a simple thing to write off his character as one of the least interesting in the superhero pantheon, and even Hemsworth expressed reluctance to wield the hammer in more Thor movies.