The idea that Sam Raimi was going to be working with a couple-hundred-million-dollar budget was deeply alluring. Though director Scott Derrickson and co-writer C. Robert Cargill would be missed — especially given how visually imaginative and narratively creative their 2016 Doctor Strange ended up being — the idea of Raimi returning to comic book cinema after his early-Aughts Spider-Man trilogy set the template for what would become the modern Disney empire was appealing in a way that kicked geek synapses into overdrive. But at best, Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness is a disaster with occasional moments of imagination and vibrancy that stand out all the more because of the dire mess of a film they desperately try to escape from.
When we get those flashes of Raimicam, or Evil Dead-style revenants, or Bruce Campbell’s most welcome cameo, it can almost feel joyful. It’s difficult not to feel like that Tyra Banks meme, because this could have been something exceptional, and we were all rooting for Disney/Marvel to work with a beloved cult director. All those little glimpses and moments scientifically disseminated throughout advance teasers and publicity hinted at big, sweeping waves of seismic change in the MCU, with characters fans have been wanting to see for ages. But every grand and gutsy gesture immediately negates itself (occasionally with some inspired PG-13 gore) like an ornate cloak that drags on the ground, wiping out every turn of fate that had been written with inconsistent CGI.
There’s an exception to this approach, and it’s the aspect of the film that moves from being inconsequential to being actively offensive. There is a precipice with this film, wherein it makes a decision so poorly conceived that it manages to retroactively incinerate one of Marvel’s most unexpected triumphs of the pandemic era. Plunging over this precipice and slipping out of sight, Multiverse of Madness manages to bring a lot down with it in its enervating collapse. You have to go back to The Rise of Skywalker to find something that commits to destroying itself so early and with such earth-scorching choices. To avoid spoilers, I’m sidestepping going any further, but spoiler is exactly the right word for what this film does to the MCU. Fans needn’t worry — the institutional structure is there and will doubtless continue on as it has to this point. But for all the hemming and hawing about Captain Marvel and Eternals by countless internet factions, this is something else entirely.
It doesn’t help that Multiverse of Madness is coming into theaters on the heels of Everything Everywhere All At Once, a film that actually embraces the imaginative possibilities of infinite potential planes of existence and does it for a fraction of the budget. There’s a truly inspired montage that finds Dr. Strange and dimension-hopping newcomer America Chavez (Xochitl Gomez) slipping through several universes while trying to make an escape, and this one minute of film is possessed of real imagination and possibility. Perhaps taking an Into the Spider-Verse approach to these 60-odd seconds might wrest something satisfying from this situation — but even that can’t fix how badly the film serves one of the MCU’s icons.
Cumberbatch is fine, and Benedict Wong and Rachel McAdams get more to do than the last go-round. But this film has problems on a script and story level that cannot be surmounted by any amount of digital everything or the occasional moment of Raimi kinesis. As a person who derived a not insignificant amount of joy playing as Shuma-Gorath in Marvel vs. Capcom 2, I must say the first-reel battle through the streets of New York with a Lloigor bearing the name Gargantos (because copyright battles are unpredictable) has a lot of visual pleasure, and is also the point after which you can absolutely check out of this film and be perfectly OK doing so. Here’s hoping that all involved parties can rebound from this mess. It’ll make hundreds of millions of dollars, and to what end.
