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Somewhere in the land of legends, demon demi god Loki (Richard Grieco)
searches for Odin's (Kevin Nash) mighty hammer, aided by a few giant
monsters. He even destroys the fortress of Valhalla before finally facing
and killing Odin - but before Odin dies, he throws the hammer straight
into another dimension to keep it out of the hands of Loki. Odin's son
Thor (Cody Deal) wants to avenge his father immediately, but is held back
by valkyrie Jarnsaxa (Patricia Velasquez), his father's closest friend who
knows young Thor might not lack the courage to take on Loki - but he lacks
in pretty much every other department. So by means of some magic, she gets
Thor to modern day Los Angeles and re-unites him with his father's hammer.
But Loki is hell-bent on getting the hammer, so he follows them and uses
all his trickery to get to it. Mostly, it's Jarnsaxa who keeps Thor
falling for Loki's tricks, but Thor is a young hothead who repeatedly
ignores her sound and well-meant - and for that he ultimately loses the
hammer to Loki and is sent to hell, while Loki's giant monsters destroy
LA. It's only in hell that Thor finds his inner strength, builds himself a
new hammer out of his courage and noble thoughts, then he returns to earth
to fight and defeat Loki.
One of this films by The Asylum that was torn apart
even before its release - and not for any objective reasons. Basically, Almighty
Thor was accused for being a cheap rip-off of Kenneth Branagh's big
budget Marvel-adaptation
Thor - and produced by The Asylum for SyFy, directed
by Fred Olen Ray's son - enough apparently to be reviled by comicbook fans
... which is quite unjustified since ... well, Marvel's
Thor is in itself a rather uninspired rip-off of Norse
legends, and certainly one of the lesser creations of the terribly uneven
team of Stan Lee and Jack Kirby, and this film at hand is certainly no
more or less faithful to the legend than the Marvel-version,
but differs from it quite considerably, and in a positive way: Here, the
makers dare to present Thor not as an infallible hero but as ... well,
maybe the most courageous being on earth, but also a man (or rather
demi-god) who lacks the skills, the smarts, the determination or even the
strength to defeat his enemy, also someone who constantly ignores good
advice, and never to his own advantage. What's more, his advisor is a sexy
woman who gets him out of one tough fit after the other - and that alone
is almost enough to float the boat ... but Richard Grieco is certainly a
great villain to keep things fun. That said of course, the film isn't
without its letdowns (mostly budget-related), the costumes and sets in the
period parts of the movie fail to really click, the monsters are too
clearly CGI-creatures, and much of the destruction they cause doesn't come
to life on both a visual and emotional level. At least though the finale
has some nice trippy portions to it, and the thing as a whole is pretty
atmospheric. In all, it's not a masterpiece, and nobody expected this
film to be ... but for what it is it's quite alright, and if you can look
beyond its shortcomings it's more pure fun than Thor even ...
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