Movie Review: THOR featuring Anthony Hopkins

Although Thor is a very good movie in its own right - an exciting, somewhat old-fashioned adventure story with strong performances, zippy humor and high-spirited action - it becomes even more impressive when you consider how much worse it could have been. Any movie has the potential to be bad, but a movie like Thor, which tells such an outrageous story, is perhaps more vulnerable because it's based in fantasy, and because the nature of fantasy is to be unbelievable, it's inherently prone to skepticism and low expectations, which are often met. But just where Thor could have been dumb and insulting, it turns out to be fun and surprisingly dramatic.

Thor, according to Norse mythology, is the god of thunder, lightning and, intriguingly, oak trees as well. In the 1960s the deity found himself repackaged by Marvel Comics, which brought him down to earth and paired him off with a foxy young nurse, although Thor's sombre, bombastic persona ensured that he never quite chimed with the fans in the way, say, Spiderman did.

Now along comes Branagh's jokey riff on the comic-book version, played out under tie-dyed skies and swinging between small-town New Mexico and a gleaming, tinfoil Asgard that looks like Nordic night at Studio 54. If Marvel Studios figured that the director would bring a little Shakespearean gravitas to the proceedings then by God, they've got another think coming.

As played by Australian newcomer Chris Hemsworth, our protagonist swaggers about like some celestial beer monster. Cast out of Asgard by his exasperated father Odin (Anthony Hopkins), he crash-lands in the desert where he is promptly run over by Jane (Natalie Portman), an earnest young scientist. Suffice to say Thor is not enamoured of these new surroundings. "I'm the son of Odin!" he roars, hurling mugs of coffee to the floor and grappling with the medics who want to inject sedative into his buttocks. "No more smashing!" scolds Jane.

What Thor desires above all else, of course, is his mystical hammer of hammering. And he had better find it sharpish because, up above, heaven is already going to hell in a handcart, what with Odin on his sick bed and the duplicitous Loki (Tom Hiddleston) scheming to forge an alliance with the frost giants. Only when the hammer makes its reappearance can Thor be returned to his former glories. Clobbered, believed dead, he suddenly rears up on Main Street, with his billowing red cloak and big, dopey grin. "Oh. My. God," breathes Jane, and she is more right than she can ever know.

I'd hesitate to call this a good film, exactly. It's overlong and all over the place. The sets are tacky and the script is in spasms. Some of the supporting players (most notably a stricken Stellan Skarsgård) appear poignantly all at sea. But there's something weirdly charming about it just the same. Branagh has knocked his film together with a terrific, freewheeling gusto. It has its tongue in its cheek and the fun is infectious. For all of its flaws, Thor's never a bore.