Multiverse of Madness

Dir: Sam Raimi. US. 2022. 126 mins. A common complaint about Marvel pictures is that their assembly-line conformity doesn't allow the individual filmmaker's ...

As with Spider-Man: No Way Home, which introduced the idea of the multiverse to the MCU, Multiverse Of Madness has fun hurtling its main character into a strange realm where the rules of our reality don’t necessarily apply. Here, too, Multiverse Of Madness tries to do things a little differently, and much of the credit goes to Olsen, who manages to sell the film’s unexpectedly touching ending — a bit of magic more enchanting than anything even these powerful characters could conjure up. Multiverse Of Madness has a delightful funhouse quality that makes room for cheerful scares as Raimi introduces demonic figures and rotting corpses, evil magic books and shocking deaths. The 2016 Doctor Strange film was novel because of its mind-bending effects, giving us a mystical character able to skip dimensions and defy the laws of physics, which led to dazzlingly psychedelic set pieces. Happily, that is not the case with Doctor Strange In The Multiverse Of Madness, which clearly bears the fingerprints of director Sam Raimi, infusing the material with the same trippy, giddy spirit which has guided his best work. Strange’s desire to protect America will put him at odds with Wanda, sending them all across the multiverse — where he will make contact with another Christine (Rachel McAdams), his former flame from our world.

Marvel sequel kicks off with relentless exposition, before buckling further and further under the weight of its magical MacGuffins.

It turns out that the point of the multiverse, and of Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness, isn’t its creative potential. With all of that in mind, the hiring of Sam Raimi feels almost like a distraction – a clever one, but still a distraction. With the reintroduction of Natalie Portman’s Jane Foster in the forthcoming Thor: Love and Thunder, this really does seem to be part one of Marvel’s “sorry we forgot about all the female love interests” apology tour. But it’s hard to find much joy in that level of world-building when Multiverse of Madness is dominated by two feverish, chaotic feelings: watching MCU head Kevin Feige try to lay the foundations for the next phase in his grand franchise plans, and simultaneously trying to tie up loose ends from what’s come before. Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness is, essentially, Spider-Man: No Way Home minus all the rose-tinted nostalgia or the one-man charisma machine that is Andrew Garfield. It also has not one ounce of the fun with its central conceit that 2018’s Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse did, minus a single sequence where the magically endowed Doctor Strange ( Benedict Cumberbatch) finds himself tumbling through portal after portal, universe after universe. I’d always thought that the appeal of the multiverse lay in its infinite possibility.

Director Sam Raimi returns to Marvel for the mind-melting Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness, one of the weirdest and most ambitious MCU entries of ...

Gomez, who’s got appealing screen presence and fits the part, is too often reduced to the role of exposition machine in the course of the film’s events, and her performance suffers for it. Elfman’s score also adds a great deal to the sense of disorientation, mixing grandiose strings with discordant single notes on the piano, and even the occasional screeching guitar. It’s Wanda’s search for her two sons, directly following up the events of 2021’s WandaVision TV series, that makes it fortuitous when she crosses paths with America Chavez (Xochitl Gomez), a young woman who seems to be the only person in existence with the ability to travel between universes. Yet it’s also very much in line with Raimi’s ability to empathize with even the most lost souls in all his movies, a part of the director’s toolbox that’s supported by Michael Waldron’s zigzagging yet heartfelt script. It’s also very much a Sam Raimi movie, and perhaps the most singularly identifiable vision of an MCU director since James Gunn sprang Guardians of the Galaxy on us nearly eight years ago. Directed by Sam Raimi, who is making his first Marvel movie and first superhero outing since completing his pre-MCU webslinging trilogy in 2007 with Spider-Man 3, Multiverse of Madness lives up to its title in all sorts of ways.

Benedict Cumberbatch returns as surgeon-superhero Stephen Strange, now on a mission to protect a teen who can visit parallel universes.

There is a funny scene in which they arrive in a version of New York where everything is decorated with plants and flowers (inspired by the High Line, perhaps), where you “go” on a red signal and where fast food is served in little balls. Familiar supporting characters recur: Benedict Wong is back, entertainingly playing Sorcerer Supreme, and Chiwetel Ejiofor is Strange’s old enemy Mordo. The Ancient One (played in the first film by Tilda Swinton and the subject of a brief culture-war casting row) is absent. America has the ability to “dreamwalk” – to enter into other parallel universes – and it is an ability she can’t control and which has enraged this demon; Strange realises it is his destiny to protect her.

Raimi is back to breathe some life into the MCU in 'Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness,' the best Phase Four film yet.

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. 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. 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’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. 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. 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.

Marvel sequel kicks off with relentless exposition, before buckling further and further under the weight of its magical MacGuffins.

With all of that in mind, the hiring of Sam Raimi feels almost like a distraction – a clever one, but still a distraction. She embodies an odd assumption that the MCU has been repeatedly guilty of making – that if we’ve been given a single opportunity to bond with a character, that in-built affection alone will be enough to carry us through every future contractual appearance. It turns out that the point of the multiverse, and of Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness, isn’t its creative potential. With the reintroduction of Natalie Portman’s Jane Foster in the forthcoming Thor: Love and Thunder, this really does seem to be part one of Marvel’s “sorry we forgot about all the female love interests” apology tour. But it’s hard to find much joy in that level of world-building when Multiverse of Madness is dominated by two feverish, chaotic feelings: watching MCU head Kevin Feige try to lay the foundations for the next phase in his grand franchise plans, and simultaneously trying to tie up loose ends from what’s come before. Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness is, essentially, Spider-Man: No Way Home minus all the rose-tinted nostalgia or the one-man charisma machine that is Andrew Garfield. It also has not one ounce of the fun with its central conceit that 2018’s Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse did, minus a single sequence where the magically endowed Doctor Strange ( Benedict Cumberbatch) finds himself tumbling through portal after portal, universe after universe.

The Spider-Man director adds some much needed flair to the Marvel Cinematic Universe.

Raimi runs right toward that madcap future, keeping Multiverse of Madness silly and loose and less concerned with the maintenance of careful branding. In Multiverse of Madness, the death of an entire universe, trillions of souls, is alluded to. Mortal stakes are much harder to render when there’s a very similar version of the same person—or alien, or god, or whoever—lurking just one croissant-layer of spacetime away. It’s a clever, kicky subversion of fan-service expectations, suggesting for a scene or two that the movie has a more developed vision of how to please, and surprise, an audience. The opening act of the film is hurried and featureless, the Marvel tank low on gas and Raimi seemingly stymied by the difficulty of taking the reins of a world so long after its genesis. Of course, now that we’re dealing with the multiverse, any of those characters could come back in a future film.

There have been complaints about MCU properties that feel like they exist merely to get people interested in the next movie or TV show, but it's never felt ...

By the time that “Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness” was pulling out the universe-bending scenes that will probably be spoiled by Friday afternoon, I started to wonder if there’s a breaking point to these CGI orgies that serve so many other properties they forget to be interesting on their own. It’s sad to see her and the character take a step back instead of exploring the ideas in the show that bore her name. It’s got a plot that could have creatively surprised viewers over and over with new variations on the very concept of a world with heroes in it and a director willing to go there. It’s very much a sequel to “WandaVision,” the show that expanded the Marvel Cinematic Universe into television. Think about how many properties are being sequel-ed in “Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness.” It’s a sequel to “ Doctor Strange,” although just barely in that you probably need to have seen that film less than the Strange adventures that followed. It’s a sequel to “ Avengers: Endgame” and “ Spider-Man: No Way Home” in that it references action in both films and extrapolates somewhat on the universe-saving decision that the title character made in the former.

Sam Raimi returns to the world of superheroes, but not even his signature horror-tinged style can save a franchise content to spin its wheels.

Yes, it’s really cool and fun to see the action figures bash together, especially when it’s filmed with the same whirlwind mania that fueled some of Sam Raimi’s best pictures. Raimi gets to play with his toys, especially in matters concerning Wanda’s witchy powers and her capacity for mindfuckery; fans of the Evil Deads and Drag Me to Hell will clap like a seal at every delightful whip-pan, anamorphic lens, and angle heavily Dutched courtesy of DP John Mathieson (Gladiator). Even Danny Elfman gets in on the fun once in a while, though apart from a few decidedly music-forward sequences his usual whimsy blends into the background. With Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness, the soul-deadening bloat of these films becomes ever clearer, mostly because you can see a great, inventive filmmaker trying, and failing, to style his way out of it. These are interesting ideas, and if Multiverse of Madness could stop for a second to explore them with more than rote platitudes, it could be interesting. Screenwriter Michael Waldron ( Loki) takes the reins here for a script that has to serve too many masters — a meditation on grief (as love persevering, yadda yadda), special-effects spectacle, cross-universal fanservice, place setting for future entries in the Marvel universe, the list goes on. Now, with the MCU nearing its thirtieth cinematic installment, in a “Phase” of the films seemingly wholly focused on the infinite capacities of the multiverse, the MCU paradoxically feels smaller and more perfunctory than ever.