This review is coming to you a day late as a result of us having sent two writers to see the premiere… only to have the theater mess up one ticket and the other writer realize they had their child’s diaper bag in the car. I don’t know if you’ve heard, but babies need diapers and moms get real frustrated when dads have the diaper bag by accident in their car parked at a theater. Thus, this review comes to you a little bit late.
Therefore, I’m going to dive right into a full-on spoiler analysis of Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness.
In case you want to know my thoughts without being spoiled, here’s the TLDR: “What the heck did I just watch and why did I watch it? It’s like a demented fifth grader sucking down Adderall wrote the script… and in all the ways that would be bad. It’s like Halloween and super heroes had a baby and the baby is deformed with no consistency whatsoever.”
Or how about this: It’s on par with The Last Jedi bad.
Now let’s get into spoilers.
I knew this film was going to be bizarre when in the first few minutes, Doctor Strange turns water into wine at a wedding and cracks a joke about it. Whatever your thoughts might be about comedy and religion, I didn’t have “make fun of Jesus Christ” on my Marvel bucket list for this movie. Within sixty seconds later, however, Doctor Strange was asking a bride about why they didn’t work out at her own reception. Huh? And then sixty seconds after that we were fighting a cyclops octopus with CGI that should make any self-respecting artist blush. No, 3D was not a good choice for this movie, even if I had thought it might help. I strongly recommend against the third dimension for this movie as it only serves to make this thing look more like a video game than I imagine it must in the two-dimensional plane.
One of the problems with this movie is that it has no consistency whatsoever. At first I was offended when Wanda throws away all her character development from the Disney+ series Wandavision through a single line. After all, if you invested hours into that show, you wasted every minute of it. As long as you know there were two kids in it, you know everything you need to for this movie. Vision, who’s Vision? The Wanda you have met in every single Marvel outing up until this point is gone and the new Wanda is a one-note evil woman who forgets the love of her life and just wants two kids that must have come out of thin air. By about halfway through the movie, however, I realized that this film couldn’t keep consistency for five minutes with its own rules, so asking it to think about how characters have behaved in other shows or movies was far too great a task. For example, in one scene Wanda is able to melt incredibly powerful male heroes trying to stop her from destroying the entire multiverse (take that, Thanos, you small-minded villain)… but when it comes to two female heroes trying to stop her, she can no longer melt them for reasons unexplained, and must therefore fist fight them. It’s a moment where it is so laughably obvious that you’re not allowed to easily defeat girls in this movie that you have to admire the cringe.
Closer look at the Undead from the #DoctorStrangeInTheMultiverseOfMadness TV Spot!#DoctorStrange pic.twitter.com/yCraplAqrD
— Comic Fanatic (@ComicFanatic4) May 1, 2022
Speaking of defeating male characters and cringe, my theater whooped and cheered when Patrick Stewart’s Charles Xavier entered the movie. This was the cameo they had all been waiting for! Five minutes later he was dead, his neck snapped without so much of a whiff of ingenuity or power on his part. Someone in the back of the theater did one of those “you have to be kidding me” laughs. It would not be the last for this film, though it was honestly the first time I’d ever heard it in any Marvel movie ever. I halfway expected Deadpool to show up at some point and die from untreated gout twenty seconds later.
Later in the movie, Dr. Strange inhabits the body of his own corpse in what can only be described as a demonic version of Rick and Morty meets The Nightmare Before Christmas. That’s appropriate since minutes before that there was a battle with music notes which made no sense, had no backstory and ended without any logic at all. But Danny Elfman got to go all Mickey’s Philharmagic with it, so I guess it was something? And if thought Doctor Strange would beat the bad guy… er, bad mom… in his own movie, think again. No, ‘Murica Chavez suddenly learns how to punch people… again out of thin air… and does so to Wanda, who apparently is tired of melting people, and Wanda has to scare two terrible child actors as a result before being chin stroked by her own self. None of this is an exaggeration or metaphor. This is literally the movie.
This is easily the worst Marvel movie I have ever seen and one of the most disjointed, illogical scripts I have ever witnessed play out on a screen. Although it probably won’t damage Marvel as much as The Last Jedi damaged Star Wars, it is truly Last Jedi bad. I’m writing this for a site where we have rated Spider-Man No Way Home a 9.5, Sonic the Hedgehog 2 a 7, and The Batman a split score depending on the audience (great if you’re into dark superhero films, different if you’re not). As for Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness, the only people I can imagine liking this are those who might like Transformers, except the insane levels of CGI are magic-based instead of robot explosions. If you can turn your brain off for two hours and just smile at the flashing colors, this might work. Otherwise, I don’t see how this is enjoyable. This one is painful.
I’ve seen worse movies, but some of those I actually walked out.
Score: 2.5 (Bad)
Who knows though… maybe I’m totally wrong? That’s the joy of free opinions. Let us know yours in the comments below, and keep reading That Park Place for all the latest news that should be fun. In this case, I’m not sure it was, but I sure gave it my darndest to make it so.
P.S. If you can get through a shield by whispering in someone’s ear, everyone depending on that shield deserves to die for such a pitiful and stupid defense system. It’s worse than the Death Star.
P.s.s. Rachel McAdams is good in this and John Krasinski gives it his all. That’s the good things I can come up with and they both are gone forever, probably.
P.s.s.s. I would rather watch Turning Red back-to-back with the voices pitched up two octaves than see this movie again.
