*Premise spoilers.*
To be fair to this movie, 1) I’m still riding the recent Marvel high of Moon Knight and 2) I recently saw and adored Everything Everywhere All at Once, which positively devoured its multiverse premise. However, this one is a mixed bag for me. It features great acting and wild visuals, but I find the story pretty rocky.
Stephen Strange is tested physically, mentally, and ethically when he takes on the job of protecting America Chavez, a teenage girl who’s being hunted for her multiverse-hopping abilities. In the wrong hands, her power could destroy every reality, and the sorcerers of Kamar-Taj band together to protect her. Along the way, Strange and America take a ride into different universes, where Strange encounters different versions of himself and other people he knows.
I tried to avoid as much of the buzz leading up to this movie as I could, not wanting to hear all the rumors of surprise Variant cameos. On this front, the movie isn’t the full smorgasbord that I think a lot of fans were hoping for, but there are some fun appearances and surprises. That said, I think the movie could’ve done a lot more to stretch and have fun with the multiverse concept.
More so than the cameos and nuggets, though, I’m interested in the plot. I mean, Spider-Man: No Way Home is well-served by its nostalgia, but it wouldn’t have worked half as well if the story wasn’t serving the characters. And when it comes to story, I will say that Strange himself has good material to work with. He’s a character who didn’t appeal to me much in his debut film, but he’s grown on me over his later MCU appearances. Here, I like seeing him confront things that his Variants have done and wonder how much he is or isn’t like them, and his self-appointed task of protecting America makes him consider what type of hero, and what type of man, he really wants to be.
Unfortunately, a number of other plot elements fall flat for me. I won’t go into spoilery details in this review, but there was a lot of stuff that I felt either wasn’t well fleshed-out or didn’t feel consistent. While I enjoy our introduction to America, I wish she spent more of the movie with her own agency—she’s relegated to damsel/MacGuffin mode for much of the proceedings. And I’m really disappointed with how the film handles Wanda’s plot, which I don’t feel jibes with her experiences in WandaVision.
The trippy visuals were one of the first film’s best qualities, and that continues to be true here. The sorcery-fueled fights are awesome, and there’s a really cool-looking scene set within Wanda’s mindscape. We don’t get as much multiverse-jumping as I was expecting, but the other universes we do visit are distinct from the Sacred Timeline MCU universe in interesting ways, and I love the rapid-fire glimpses we get of other, wilder ones during Strange and America’s travels.
I’ve had time to come around to the accent Benedict Cumberbatch uses for Strange, and I think he turns in some nice work here. Xochitl Gomez is spunky and charming in her debut as America, Rachel McAdams gets a bit more to do as Christine than she did in the first film, and Benedict Wong’s Wong is a welcome, if underused, presence. But as far as acting goes, Elizabeth Olsen owns this movie. I don’t like what the story does with Wanda, but Olsen plays the hell out of it from top to bottom.
Warnings
Violence, language, disturbing images, drinking, and strong thematic elements.
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