‘Doctor Strange In The Multiverse Of Madness’ Is A Massive Marvel Misfire

In the Marvel Cinematic Universe spanning 28 blockbuster feature films and half a dozen prestige streaming series, some properties are necessarily going to bring up the rear. With today’s release of Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness, the perennial runts of the litter, Thor: The Dark World, Iron Man 2, Avengers: Age of Ultron, and recent addition, Eternals, have some company in the MCU basement. And this one somehow feels like a bigger misstep than all of them.

Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness isn’t completely terrible. It certainly has its entertaining moments, and Benedict Cumberbatch still holds the screen like a movie star even when he’s not exactly doing his best work. But unlike previous Marvel duds that can be chalked up to ideas that didn’t work as well as they should have, DSITMOM largely accomplishes what it sets out to do. It’s just what it sets out to do isn’t very nice.

The film is a franchise installment with a mandate to consolidate a bunch of loose plot threads from the first Doctor Strange, Spider-Man: No Way Home and the recent Disney Plus series Wandavision, Loki and What If? as a way to bridge to the next stage of the MCU. That’s what fans have been expecting since the earliest clips and rumors began circulating more than a year ago, and that’s what the film is and does. However, the Marvel brain trust seems to have forgotten that there’s more to making a movie than connecting dots on a master plot map.

The result is a soulless grind, both exhausted and exhausting, even at a brief-by-Marvel-standards 126 minutes. Characters like Doctor Strange (Cumberbatch), dimension-spanning newcomer America Chavez (Xochitl Gomez), Strange’s ex Christine Palmer (Rachel McAdams) and old rival Baron Mordo (Chiwetel Ejiofor) are given paper-thin motivations and turned loose in a convoluted plot. The appealing character Wong (Benedict Wong), recently promoted to Sorcerer Supreme, is reduced to a collection of mannerisms that we’ve now seen too many times in other, better movies. Despite the efforts of talented actors, none of these characters share a thimbleful of onscreen chemistry – least of all Stephen Strange and Christine, a relationship meant to be at the heart of the movie.

DSITMOM reserves its worst treatment for Elizabeth Olson’s Wanda Maximoff, aka The Scarlet Witch. Maximoff is an intriguing character in Marvel canon, and was given a very rich backstory in previous Avengers movies and in her own series Wandavision. All that gets flattened into cackling villainy here because it turns out that what one of the most powerful beings on earth secretly wants is to be a suburban mom, and she’s willing to destroy all of reality to satisfy that desire. The MCU doesn’t have a sterling record in treating its powerful women characters very well (and also seems to have some big issues with childless women). That streak gets extended here, bigtime.

Director Sam Raimi tries to salvage this mess with his trademark flourishes of levity, over-the-top gore and kinetic camera movement. But that task proves harder than trying to get a zombie to do magic by remote control from the next dimension over. Everyone is phoning it in, and honestly, there’s not much even a strong director like Raimi or a talented cast can do with some of writer Michael Waldron’s dialogue. Unfortunately, some of Raimi’s efforts to put his own spin on the film’s visual look fall into no-man’s land between cheesy-fun and just cheesy.

In lieu of a compelling, character-driven story or groundbreaking visual effects, DSITMOM substitutes generous helpings of fan service. Its biggest emotional moments are completely extrinsic to the story, and rely on next-level MCU knowledge, residual fan affection for old properties, or the promise of new, long-awaited additions to the MCU. Whether those scenes pay off fan expectations depends on your point of view, but (minor spoilers) yes, they are in there, and they raised a cheer from the Marvel faithful who packed the preview. Maybe the best gag in the whole film is a call-back to director Sam Raimi’s original indie classic Evil Dead, and gets its belly laugh from stunt casting.

The problem is, you can’t make a meal of easter eggs, especially when there’s no main course. There’s nothing in DSITMOM that we haven’t seen before: the stoic if slightly arch Doctor Strange gesturing mystically at supernatural menaces; his earnest pal Wong leading a whole army of magic monks gesturing mystically at supernatural menaces; crossovers we never thought we’d see; elaborate hell-dimensions modeled on the artwork of Doctor Strange creator Steve Ditko. At least the trope of the all-powerful heroine losing her marbles and nearly destroying reality was better realized here than in X-Men: Dark Phoenix, though that’s a low bar to clear.

As disappointing as Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness is, there is a quality floor to any Marvel product as long as the key ingredients are present. Doctor Strange brings back familiar characters doing their familiar things, includes some fine action set-pieces, introduces several ideas and characters like America Chavez who might prove more interesting later, and advances the master storyline another step or two. Marvel fans will see it; many will enjoy it. Some non-Marvel fans will see it, and perhaps a few may understand it, or enjoy it without having any idea what most of it is about.

Most of all, anyone who is a Marvel fan who has somehow resisted subscribing to Disney Plus will probably sign up for a trial membership so they can figure out how all this relates to the past two years’ worth of streaming content. And that, I’m afraid, is what it’s all about.