Alan Mattli’s review published on Letterboxd:
One of the better encapsulations of the phase-four MCU is the fact that Love and Thunder's credits are presented in 1980s hard rock album cover fonts even though virtually nothing about the movie that precedes them ever makes any discernible attempt to key into that aesthetic: slapping the marketable trappings of a theoretically appealing idea onto the same drab old paint-by-numbers job and pretending your movie is the thing it's half-heartedly masquerading as.
At this point, I'm mainly wondering what it is that these movies have left to give. Everything's been done at least five times. The visuals, both in terms of effects and camerawork, get progressively worse. In a world where Spider-Man: No Way Home exists (a movie I do not care for, I might add), who cares about the Guardians of the Galaxy showing up in a Thor movie? What's noteworthy about Taika Waititi drowning his audience in increasingly stale quips and painfully protracted running gags when that brand of smugly self-aware non-humour has long since become the guiding tone of the entire franchise? How many more times can a superhero feasibly find their innermost self and learn that Love Is The Most Powerful Thing In The Universe?
Love and Thunder isn't abysmal, at least not by the standards of the franchise that surrounds it – but because it is such a listless hodgepodge of most of the current MCU's worst impulses, it really lays bare the filmsiness of the entire operation: it's famous people in Halloween costumes standing around in flat, featureless, overlit spaces exchanging watercooler banter and/or in-universe justifications for why they are currently finding themselves in said flat, featureless, overlit space. This isn't even empty spectacle anymore – it's just empty.