You have no idea just how reasonable I’ve been.
Right, Book of the Damned, calling yourself a witch, conjuring creatures to abduct a kid. I don’t exactly call that being reasonable.
Sending those creatures after her instead of myself was mercy. And in spite of your hypocrisies and insults, I have begged you to safely get out of my way. You have exhausted my patience. But I do hope you understand that, even now, what’s about to happen . . . this is me, being reasonable.
I wasn’t a particularly big fan of the first Doctor Strange movie. There were certainly things I liked about it; I didn’t go back and check my big database o’ reviews, but I feel like I gave it three out of four stars. A solid, mostly entertaining movie. It wasn’t really until Infinity War where I really got sold on the character himself. And I was initially intrigued by director Scott Derrickson’s remarks about how this movie, Multiverse of Madness, would be the MCU’s first horror movie and that it would be scary. Then producer Kevin Feige pushed back on it and quicker than you could say “creative differences,” Derrickson was out. This bothered me at the time because I thought that it meant that the studio was going to go in less of a horror direction, that the MCU was going to once again kick out a filmmaker with a real vision in order of somebody a bit more milktoasty (ala Edgar Wright & Peyton Reed). But then Sam Raimi got the job and suddenly, I started to get cautiously optimistic. A great horror director for sure and also a great super-hero director – not a lot of people check both of those boxes. Then again, it had been ten years since his last movie and that was Oz the Great & Powerful, a movie that I had genuinely forgotten existed. Then WandaVision happened and I went over the moon for it; it’s quite simply one of the best things the MCU has ever done and I was very excited to see more of Elizabeth Olsen as Wanda. Coming out of WandaVision, she was maybe my favorite character in the MCU and had certainly given the best performance. All of this is just to kind of set the table for where I was when this movie started. Cautiously optimistic, praying it wouldn’t be a disaster, excited but a little scared.
I’ll just tip my hand right off. I love this movie. Just unreservedly passionate about it. About halfway through the movie, I started to wonder if this was going to end up being my new favorite MCU movie. I just had the biggest, goofiest smile on my face basically the whole time. I was emotionally wrapped up in the characters and the story; I was stunned by the visuals and the atmosphere; I was constantly surprised by the things the movie was showing me; I was as entertained as I had been in a movie theater in what seemed like years. I’m sorry, but it’s true: 28 movies in, twenty-*******-eight, the MCU was doing something I’d never seen them do before. They let Sam Raimi off the chain and he killed it, in a good way I mean. Phase Four Haters: get ******.
I’m sorry, I don’t mean to sink to that level. Let’s not give in to hate; let’s talk about love! Namely, the things I love about this movie. This is closer to the kind of nuttiness that I’m looking for in a Multiverse movie than the overstuffed Spider-Man: No Way Home. That was a movie where, for all the mixing and mash-ups, there wasn’t really much going on that was that surprising. In this movie, however, I just never knew what was around the corner and the movie constantly surprised me with some stylish visual or an odd character beat or just a moment that kind of encapsulated the film’s attitude as a whole. Full praise to director Raimi and screenwriter Michael Waldron for landing both those bad-ass, super-cool moments and also telling a compelling and emotional story.
You may recall that I said after WandaVision that I didn’t think Wanda would be the villain of this movie and that, in fact, I thought it wouldn’t make sense with her character after the finale of WandaVision. Well, I’ll happily eat those words because Elizabeth Olsen is fantastic in this film, sympathetic at one moment, genuinely scary at another. I loved how much of a horror movie this really is and, while I did say in some of my reviews of WandaVision that I found Scarlet Witch a creepy figure at times, she really goes full-on horror villain here and it’s a delight. I think it works because of the Darkhold; I’m able to accept that she’s been corrupted and while others might quibble, I think the realization that her children are out there in the Multiverse is different enough from her grief over Vision’s death that it doesn’t feel like this movie is treading overly familiar ground.
I’ve also seen people saying that Cumberbatch and Strange get sidelined in favor of Wanda and, while Wanda’s arc is central to the film, I disagree. Cumberbatch gets to play something like four different versions of himself; his regular arrogant self, an even more arrogant self, a haunted would-be hero and, of course, that evil version from the end. I think he kills it in all of these versions and in some of them he has only a few minutes of screen time to sell the character. I think Cumberbatch is far better here than he was in the first Doctor Strange film and I think the character’s arc is strong too, going from a guy who is existentially stuck in a moment of time to a man willing and able to do whatever needs to be done to move forward. Did I forget to mention he also plays an undead Strange who, in one of the film’s most breathtaking moments, literally flies with a cloak made entirely of screaming demons?
It’s just such a gonzo and exciting movie. Benedict Wong is perfect as usual as Wong, now a perpetually annoyed Sorcerer Supreme, and Chiwietel Ejiofer is also having a better time than he did in the first movie. Rachel McAdams too; she’s actually given things to do here, unlike in the first film. There’s even a bizarre cameo by Michael Stuhlbarg and we all know that makes a movie better, right? I guess I get that some people just weren’t down with how Raimi this movie was, just how crazy it gets. But during the sequence where Strange and Wanda confront an alternate universe version of the Illuminati, featuring a load of familiar, but somewhat different, faces, I just realized that I was as entertained as I’ve been in a theater in a really, really long time. Like I said, I understand that some people didn’t exactly love seeing heroes brutally murdered in existentially terrifying ways. You know, maybe the kids miss out on this one, but I was there for it. That neck snap is maybe my favorite movie moment of the year. But, while the movie is goofy and fun, it’s never silly; the MCU often mistakes “silly” for “fun,” but this one gets the balance right, leavening the incredible entertainment value with genuine darkness, menace and, yeah, good old-fashioned scares. And, hell, you might just get a little misty at the climax of Wanda’s story; this movie really checks all the boxes. The credits scenes are variable, one of them hilarious, the other one just kind of dull. But this probably does have the single best final shot of an MCU movie proper. I know some people probably think I’m just a guy who’s in the tank for Marvel and, admittedly I’ve liked more of the MCU movies than I’ve disliked, at least pre-Phase Four, but even for the MCU, this one is something super-special. 4 stars.
tl;dr – Sam Raimi brings a unique vision to the MCU with this gonzo, stylish and incredibly entertaining superhero/horror mash-up; consistently surprising, actually scary and a rush of pure energy. 4 stars.