GameSpot listed four dealbreakers in Thor: Love and Thunder, then stapled a 7 to it
The Original Review
“A movie that fully commits to the bit, for better and for worse.”
Let's inventory what this review actually says. The villain — Christian Bale, an actual Oscar winner playing a god-murderer — is 'criminally underused' with roughly 15 minutes of screen time. The jokes 'never stop coming,' which in review language means the movie is a smoke detector with a low battery. A cancer storyline 'sits awkwardly next to screaming goats.' And the film 'never quite figures out what it wants to be.' That's four independent structural failures, catalogued in writing, by the reviewer himself. Final score: 7/10. I ran the numbers eleven times. The math aint mathing.
A 7 is supposed to mean 'good.' What Phil described is a movie where the villain is missing, the tone is broken, the comedy is exhausting, and the identity is unresolved. If I described a bridge that way, you would not give the bridge a 7. You would close the bridge. GameSpot instead certified it for traffic because the deductions apparently happen on a ruler made of soup — you press the flaws against it and the ruler just squishes politely and says 'another solid entry in the MCU machine.'
Let's do the arithmetic GameSpot refused to do. Start at 10. Villain criminally underused: that's the load-bearing wall of a superhero movie, minus 2. Tonal whiplash between terminal illness and goat screams: minus 1.5. Jokes that 'never stop coming,' the reviewer's own words, delivered like a complaint: minus 1. Doesn't know what it wants to be: minus 1.5, because that's the ONE question a review exists to answer. That's a 4, and I was being generous on the goats. The only way to land on 7 from this evidence is if the scoring rubric has a hidden cell labeled 'is Marvel' with a +3 hardcoded into it.
This is the great GameSpot magic trick: write a 5, score a 7, and hope nobody scrolls to the bottom and the top of the same article. The text and the number aren't two views of one opinion — they're two strangers who got handcuffed together at the layout stage. Somewhere in GameSpot's CMS there's a field called 'score' that hasn't spoken to the field called 'body' since 2019. I've seen calculator crime scenes before, but this one has the calculator's fingerprints wiped. The math aint mathing, and it never mathed.
