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‘Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness’ Review: Sam Raimi returns

Doctor Strange
Marvel Studios

Editor’s Note: This article contains very mild spoilers for the first half-hour of Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness. You have been warned.

To say that Sam Raimi’s Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness is the best film in the Marvel Cinematic Universe since Avengers: Endgame feels as if I’m damning it with faint praise, and I partially am. It’s not a particularly high bar to clear when your film is competing against the likes of Black Widow, Shang-Chi, and Eternals, each of which featured ill-chosen directors smacking up against the outer walls of their skills in service of material that either couldn’t sustain a long-term series in the comic world (the first of the three) or had trouble escaping the gravity of audience/fan indifference in the before being brought to the big screen (the latter two). Little good has come from the MCU’s wilderness period following the departure of its biggest stars, and the diversification of the distribution of their media properties has added even more of a headache for those seeking to try and understand exactly what the hell is going on on-screen at any given point, even if they’ve devoted three calendar days of their lives attempting to keep up with these movies. So, if you haven’t seen WandaVision, there are bits and pieces where you’ll be totally lost here (though it’s not as bad as it could have been, which I’ll discuss later). It suffers from practically all of the same issues that most Phase Four MCU movies have: as mentioned, it’s overly reliant on continuity, it’s pretty hackily written and relies way too much on Pavlovian recognition from the audience, where one can practically feel the “Please Clap” lights turn on like it’s Kevin Feige’s sitcom and we’re all living in it. Too bad Kevin Knows Best was already taken, because I’m sure that’s what he’d name his faux-autobiographical show when he finally takes control of Disney and demands tribute.

Yet Multiverse of Madness, by fortuitous accident, offers a compelling counter to Feige’s strategy of pushing brand names on the marquee while hoping that no one will notice how neglected the actual craft of the product is, even if it bears his P.G.A. credit in the end titles. It’s been rare for a Marvel director to jump ship mid-franchise, as Scott Derrickson did when he announced he wouldn’t be returning to the Mystic Arts for another outing a few years back, but it was a lesson that Feige learned the hard way. The disastrous behind-the-scenes drama during the making of Thor: The Dark World — which saw Patty Jenkins fired from the production and replaced by Alan Taylor, he of Game of Thrones fame weeks into shooting — was a rare PR failure for Feige and an opportunity for the Distinguished Competition to seize upon the one culture-war mountaintop that it seemed impossible for the Mouse to climb, which they grabbed by the throat as soon as they hired Jenkins to direct Wonder Woman. Since then, Feige’s attempted to grow filmmakers along with franchises, no matter the prestige of the names involved, dangling one-for-us-one-for-you shots at passion projects as a Faustian bargain to guarantee their fealty. He wants respect, dammit, but he doesn’t want to let his children off the leash to free-play with the other kids in the dirt because they might get sick or be influenced by the bad behavior of those also at the playground. Bringing in Raimi — a known *gasp* genre auteur — as a replacement runs against the grain of that entire theorem,

Let me be clear: With the exception of a single mid-film reveal so eye-rollingly executed until the man who made Evil Dead II steps in and goes much harder than he needs to in that particular moment (you can almost feel him turn over the keys to Feige when it happens, as he leaves for a break so he can check on how the make-up guys are coming along), everything that people will enjoy on a minute-to-minute basis on this film is due to Sam Raimi being shot caller. Contrary to what a lot of folks, and I include myself in this “folks,” assumed, there’s a lot of Raimi’s style in this movie, and it plays like a goofy merge between the fantasy aspects of Army of Darkness and the thrill-ride sensibility of Drag Me to Hell if that combination had also been packaged up in a Classics Illustrated package for kids too lazy to crack open the actual work itself. That’s not wholly a dig at those comic book takes on the likes of Melville and Homer, because there was value in introducing them to kids in an easily digestible format: the problem only comes when they assume that it’s a substitute for reading Moby Dick or The Odyssey. Raimi’s Spider-Man films operated in a similar capacity, forcing nerds, much as Tim Burton and Joel Schumacher did, to acknowledge that people behind the camera play an essential role in shaping in translating these works for the screen, which is an approach that’s being slowly lost on the Disney side, under the metaphorical corporate thumb, as profit-oriented as it is predictably banal in execution. In short, it has a feel of handiwork behind it, like an assembly-line worker carving their initials into the interior of an iPhone before letting it go off to Peniscola.

Take, for instance, the film’s first major action sequence, coming after an obstacle course “escape” scene in the World-Between-Worlds or whatever, full of cotton candy clouds and collapsing buildings, as if someone hired the Thor concept design team to remake a Katy Perry video, in which an alternate Dr. Strange (Benedict Cumberbatch) and America Chavez (Xochitl Gomez), a teen from a distance universe who can summon portals to other dimensions, try to get a book of unimaginable power before they’re killed by a reality-intruding monster. That Strange is killed, Chavez, the monster, and the sorcerer’s corpse are tossed into the MCU that we’re all familiar with without the book. The Strange in that world, fresh from his adventures with the Spider-Men, is attending the wedding of his former girlfriend Christine (Rachel McAdams), who met and fell and love with another man while the good Doctor was a pile of dust for five years, when he notices a giant starfish monster causing havoc in the busy streets of New York and leaps into action.

Emphasis on “busy”: This isn’t the empty Manhattan found in the sparse digital backgrounds of Jon Watts’ soulless No Way Home: It’s the New York of the Raimi films, populated by reasonable facsimiles of real people. He lingers on the shocked and terrified expressions of office workers confronted with the sublimely absurd, he focuses on the partygoers at the wedding thrilling when Strange takes flight to leap into action, and it’s all being done to emphasize that the heroics of the moment aren’t solely limited to slaying this big beast, but also to save as many lives as possible in the process. Also, there’s a focus on character: we’re meant to relate to these characters on a visceral level as they endure their labors and their peril rather than just through subpar watercooler-styled banter crammed in like a TGIF block writer-composed turducken. There’s more genuine danger faced by the characters in this sequence than there has been in the last half-dozen of these films, ever since the post-Infinity War began Marvel’s trend of looking backward to look forward, with the safety of the no-stakes navel-gazing insulating the viewer from having to worry about whether or not their favorite characters would make it through a film safely. And even though you know what’s going to happen — it is, after all, the first true action sequence — it’s still compelling to watch unfold. Sure, there are some garish witticisms, and Marvel still hasn’t met a laser light show battle it hasn’t loved, an aesthetic edict that often limits what Raimi can do with his magic here (though he manages to make it work later on in the film with a fun music-inspired duel), it still feels like a Sam Raimi film rather than just your quarterly ration of Marvel, issued to ensure that you remain sated and happy and don’t begin to look too hard at the men behind the curtain.

It’s a wonder that Multiverse of Madness works as well as it does, given all of the things behind-the-scenes that are working against it. This may be the first time that Feige’s truly overplayed his hand with regards to his “careful” cross-universe plotting, as the film’s script is messy as all hell thanks to things not within the text itself. The film has a giant hole where the original version of WandaVision should be, given that Strange was supposed to feature in that show as a member of the team trying to pull the Scarlett Witch out of her magic-induced fascist stupor (apparently the commercials were intended to be Strange’s attempts to subliminally coax Wanda into remembering who she was and what she was doing, but that was lost when either COVID fucked up the show’s ending or Feige realized he was diluting an on-screen franchise’s brand by putting Cumberbatch on TV), and without that context and prior conflict, the film’s central dynamic between its protagonist and antagonist doesn’t wholly work. Likewise, the source materials that the writers are pulling from aren’t Doctor Strange comics, they’re gleaned from recent multiversal tales told by writers like Jonathan Hickman and Kieron Gillan in a much more complex and interesting fashion, which had, you know, thematic weight behind their ideas rather than just existing as convenient excuses for scenes that will make people point at the screen and shout. Hence the Classics Illustrated comparison, back for round 2: Feige doesn’t have time for that power and responsibility bullshit, he covered that with Watts in the last MCU film.

Raimi, however, plugs the gaps and, importantly, has fun doing so. He goes out of his way to inject meager scenes with measures of life, be it through a transition or through Raimi-cam or unexpected slapstick. There’s a wit and a verve to how he applies his skills in Multiverse of Madness, which adds a surprising amount of spice that would have probably been rendered lifeless in Derrickson’s hands under the Feige banner. Yet it’s telling that it feels like the reason Raimi was given more room to breathe is because of how muddled and messy the development process was, the equivalent of a creative during a shoot throwing their hands up and shouting “WE’LL DO IT IN POST” when the lighting doesn’t work out exactly as they intended it to in-camera, outsourcing their role to as an on-set craftsman to some people in a post-production house. It’s the inverse of what should be, in ideal circumstances, where the artist should be in charge of ensuring that the film is executed to the intended goals of the production: To move, to entertain, to enlighten, etc. But after billions and billions of dollars and critical laurels, one might understand why someone like Feige (or the whole Marvel-Disney brain trust) believes that they know better than these dumb filmmakers — they are hit-makers, after all, the one thing uniting the disparate forces in service of the goal.

Raimi is the exception that proves the rule, and moreover, he’s the exception that proves this rule is bullshit, because if every Phase Four Marvel movie were as interesting as this one, it’d be easier to accept them as what the fans so desperately want them to be: Distinct films, united under a single banner, spanning sub-genres and styles, rather than the grey goo consuming modern blockbuster cinema.