Doctor Strange In The Multiverse Of Madness Review: 6 Ups & 4 Downs
Sam Raimi leaves his stamp on the MCU with uneven results.
The first Marvel Cinematic Universe movie of 2022 is finally here - coming almost five months after the release of the phenomenally successful Spider-Man: No Way Home, Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness is out now around the world.
Positioned as a follow-up to both No Way Home and more explicitly the Disney+ series WandaVision, Multiverse of Madness expands the bounds of the MCU's multiversal potential, even if the storytelling can't always keep up.
Those worried that legendary director Sam Raimi would get swallowed up in the machinery of franchise formula can more-or-less rest easy, because this feels identifiably like a Raimi film, despite the filmmaker having to contend with some lackluster creative decisions elsewhere.
Yet aesthetically and tonally it is a considerably more ambitious film than the original Doctor Strange, taking gambles that both payoff spectacularly and end up falling flat.
As such this is a messy movie which is sure to prove disappointing and pleasantly surprising to different swaths of fans who expected different things from it.
Ultimately it probably shakes out somewhere in the MCU's mid-tier, yet is perhaps more forgettable than you'd want from a Raimi-directed multiverse film.
And so first, here's what it doesn't get right...