(EW.com) -- Every superhero movie is, on some level, an attempt to demonstrate that a godlike being with flabbergasting powers â€” he flies! He wields a megaton hammer! â€” also has an inner life. The success of the film hinges on how well it yokes together the external and the internal. "Thor: The Dark World," a watchable but technologically over-scaled slab of Marvel boilerplate, is far from a great superhero movie â€” it's more like the diagram for one. Having done his time as a magical Norse hunk-out-of-water in "Thor" (2011) and "The Avengers" (2012), our hero (Chris Hemsworth) now finds himself back on Asgard. There, his father, Odin (Anthony Hopkins, serving up his own special brand of highbrow scenery chewing), enlists him in a battle for the cosmos.
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Critic gives "Thor: The Dark World" a B- grade
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Far from a great superhero movie, it's more like a diagram for one
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Director Alan Taylor brings little storytelling tightness to "Dark World"
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Tom Hiddleston's Loki is about the only fully realized character
Hiddleston, with pleading eyes and a mad-dog grin, plays @placeholder as a wounded sociopath who's cackling at the world but seething on the inside.