Film Review: Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness (SPOILER FREE)
Images courtesy of The Walt Disney Company.
When Disney announced the title of their Doctor Strange sequel, it felt like they were calling their shot. At the time – mid-2019, as they went to Comic-Con and did their customary announcement of the full ‘Phase Four’ slate of films – we knew only that it would co-star Elizabeth Olsen’s Wanda Maximoff, and that it would be called Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness. There was promise in that. The choice of “in the” and not “and the” had an adventure-serial bent to it, and “Madness” seemed equally campy and stylised. It felt like the kind of swerve promised in this new Phase Four.
However, the most surprising development, and the one that has proven to be the most crucial, was when returning director Scott Derrickson dropped out and was replaced by beloved genre auteur Sam Raimi, who had directed the Spider-Man trilogy in the early 2000s. The resulting movie, the 28th in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, is remarkable entirely because of Raimi’s influence. The response to this one will be interesting: it's unquestionably Marvel’s most frightening film, and its most gruesome, but those are relative terms. It is still a Marvel film, with plenty of the baggage and the weaknesses that entails – but it’s a surprisingly good one.
Strikingly, it doesn’t feel bloated in the traditional MCU way. Perhaps in terms of its convoluted plot, yes, but not with regard to the runtime: Raimi gets through this material at an unyielding pace, particularly after the first thirty minutes. You’ve got to assume it’s a result of him not caring about MCU canon – it’s refreshing! Even though the climax of this film, with its various threads and mechanics, is not so much explainable in a sentence – try three or four paragraphs – you barely notice, because multifaceted or not, this thing moves.
The plot follows sorcerer Stephen Strange as he encounters America Chavez (newcomer Xochitl Gomez, who has just turned sixteen), a plucky teenager who is totally unable to control her unique ability to punch holes in reality and travel to alternate universes. She becomes something of a human MacGuffin as established characters like Wong (the wonderfully energetic Benedict Wong) and Scarlet Witch (Elizabeth Olsen) get drawn into the action.
It's a very Marvel script – penned by Loki showrunner Michael Waldron – right down to its use of recurring lines of dialogue that signpost when it’s time to Talk About Themes. As is customary, the title character gets an arc when elsewhere they have just had cameos. This movie’s Stephen Strange is a harried, extremely capable do-gooder with a whole host of uncomfortable baggage he’s just not-quite-good-enough at pushing aside, and some really awful hair (more so than before, the trim and the beard look just astonishingly fake). Benedict Cumberbatch appears to have a blast, too, playing multiple mutiversal variant versions of our titular hero.
Strange anchors us through what appears at first to be a rollicking multiverse-hopping movie, but settles into something more familiar. The main alternate universe we visit is quickly and predictably made to serve the Marvel IP that occupies it – this stuff is what they do best and the appeal is undeniable, but you can’t help but sigh at the promise of this movie’s title falling victim to MCU payoffs and cameos.
In a story about characters grappling with that which is lost and cannot come back, it appears to be Marvel themselves who should be moving forward: not all of these films need to follow the recipe that gives you Endgame-level returns, and this one, with its Raimi flourishes, makes you feel the frustration of what could be. There is stuff in here that doesn’t match, and just drags.
In the last act of the film, Rachel McAdams’ Christine Palmer gets a lot of play, and it does not work. I think I’d feel a little more warmly toward this element of the film if even one person involved seemed to care about it: not Raimi, not the writers (of this film or the 2016 original… in neither of which does Christine really have defining qualities to speak of), and certainly not McAdams herself.
It’s made all the more painful by the relative success of the Wanda Maximoff storyline. Marvel has had this character in their pocket for years now, and between their house-specialty film-to-film character progression and the extremely popular WandaVision Disney+ series, has been teeing up a real chance for Elizabeth Olsen to get her moment. Madness delivers on that in spades, and this Scarlet Witch is completely captivating – as well as getting the most functional character work in the movie.
The needle that Raimi is threading in this whole thing is between dynamic, lively filmmaking, and serving the kind of Marvel-brain that gives characters payoffs on journeys that started six films ago. More so than anything else it’s probably a matter of controlling your expectations. If you understand where Marvel head honcho Kevin Feige will stay hands-off (and where he won’t), Madness will read as a fun, genre-y bend of the unbending Marvel Blockbuster, and not another overstuffed drudge that just happens to have some scenes they let Sam Raimi direct. It’s a movie bound by the narrative and stylistic continuity of its universe, but it’s also got real visual and formal invention, proper moments of tension, and a surprisingly gonzo sensibility.
Without prior knowledge of it being Raimi in the chair, you’d be forgiven for wondering what’s going on at Marvel. It’s far from earth-shattering (and I’ll be rolling my eyes at the inevitable “an MCU horror movie!” labels), but you can really feel him go for the shocks and the discomfort in there at times, and that is a far cry from MCU house style. Raimi is certainly a more anarchic hand than the MCU brains trust seems to have bargained for, and he shakes the tree enough times here that I couldn’t help but grin. It’s invigorating. I mean, this movie sees one character splattered with oily robotic ‘blood’ and another impaled on a wrought iron fence, a number of very Sam-Raimi ‘projectile camera’ shots, an eyeball ejected from its socket in full view, and a battle between two characters conjuring musical notes at each other.
It's that cheeky/gruesome combo, so characteristic of this director, that feels genuinely new in an MCU film. I’m aware that what I’m identifying so warmly is just the footprint of an Actual Filmmaker on a movie like this. Many people – those bored by marvel’s formula, and likewise those who love the MCU and feel it is being perverted here – will see Madness as unsatisfying for entirely opposing reasons. I just had a really fun time.
Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness is screening in cinemas nationwide from Thursday the 5th of May. For tickets and more info, click here.