Mulleted, malletted and musclebound, Chris Hemsworth (THOR) gets hammered for hubris by Dad – ODIN (Sir Anthony Hopkins). When tantrummy THOR throws his weight and his hammer around like a 5-year old refused an icecream, he risks war with Ice King Lauffey who wants to conquer the Sagaland of Asgard.

ODIN despairs of his son (and Hopkins of the ineffably silly screenplay), so banishes him mallet and mullet, to Earth so he can acquire humility and the hots for scatty scientist Nats Portman who ex-swans about apparently studying an Einsteinian bridge which worm-holes its way to another dimension. Asgard, Earth and the 3D process may be multi-dimensional but story and characters remain rigorously limited to one throughout.

Tom Hiddleston, Branagh’s Wallander-mate (Martinsson) is THOR’s brother LOKI outwardly solicitous towards his brother’s injudicious hammer-chucking but of course secretly coveting the crown: well not so much crown as a Princess Beatrice wedding hat number all horns and inexplicable flourishes in a reticent lacquered gold: probably like everything else this week from the House of McQueen. Poor old Tom hisses a lot as a kind of Scandinavian Sir Prancelot but skinny is as skinny does and we know he’ll be no match for the horror hammer-chucker.

An army of CGI technicians and stuntpersons slightly fewer than the current population of Bejing collaborated to give this tosh the aesthetically dead kitschy sheen of 3-D visual literalism. What it cost is what you see – down to every last misspent million bucks.

Scenes on Earth remain obdurately earth-bound though following THOR down the wormhole, offers at least some wam bam action scenes for which Branagh is famously not known, but which do stun you into merciful forgetfulness regarding the crap screenplay.

OK so it’s another Marvel comic-book fantasy but I’ve made this point before: I was raised on the marvellously inventive comics of Superman, Batman, Marvelman et al. But the cold dead hand of commercial exploitation that is Hollywood has here and with others in the genre, substituted graphical literalism for imagination-provoking drawings; dire, wordy dialogue for crisp, witty often ironic bubble-words. At least say Ironman captured some of the wit and style of the genre.

The acting is to say the least uneven: Hopkins looks distracted as if he’s counting his fee; Portman ‘acts’ a lot, always the sign of a desperate actor trying to flog some life into a dead-horse script, the elsewhere excellent Stellan Skarsgard looks bemused throughout and Hunky Hemsworth displays all the animation and expressiveness of a flexing bicep.

To paraphrase another mind-numbing movie on release – this one’s Fast and Ludicrous.

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