Movie Review: Doctor Strange

The Marvel Cinematic Universe gets into the mind-expansion business (and Benedict Cumberbatch gets into the accent-expansion business) with Doctor Strange.

Audiences in 2016 are not wowed easily and Marvel is to blame. Their stars - a mechanical tech billionaire, his super serum-powered frenemy, a Norse god and a lumbering green monster – have been not only normalised, but turned into twice-yearly acquaintances. I see Black Widow more frequently than I see some friends.

So, with viewer (and creative) fatigue setting in, to whom can Marvel Studios turn to for re-invigoration? A cocky doctor with mystical, mind-expanding powers and even more mystical facial hair? Sure, that’ll kill two hours.

Sherlock’s Benedict Cumberbatch plays Dr. Stephen Strange in the aptly-titled Doctor Strange. At first glance, he’s sort of like Tony Stark in medical scrubs; quick-witted, uncannily talented, insufferable. Later, he’ll shave his beard into a precise, Starkian goatee. Can RDJ sue for copyright infringement?

A careless car accident mangles Strange’s gifted hands, ruining his neurosurgical career and isolating him from his patient colleague (and ex), Christine Palmer (Rachel McAdams). With modern medicine unable to restore him to his former glory, he follows a tip to Kathmandu, seeking the tutelage of the so-called Ancient One (Tilda Swinton) at Kamar-Taj, a temple of spiritual healing and whitewashing. There, she convinces him to shed his preconceptions and humble himself before the multiverse, from which her students draw otherworldly power. They also have Wi-Fi.

After much training, Strange begins crafting sparkly weaponry and shields from the ether and even regains strength in his fingers. Eventually he’s told that he’s now a soldier in a war against world-ending interdimensional beasties, being summoned by the twisted zealot Kaecilius (Mads Mikkelsen). This seems like something you should probably cover during orientation.

Director Scott Derrickson, like all who’ve come before him, has no choice but to work within the visual and tonal template outlined by Jon Favreau in the first Iron Man. He and cinematographer Ben Davis, along with their creative team behind the scenes, still conjure some spectacular set pieces despite those limitations. After all, you can’t make a movie about a straight-up wizard who can open portals and travel into the ‘mirror dimension’ and not demonstrate a little creative flair.

One action sequence is set against a reversing backdrop; others take place as skyscrapers fold in on themselves in Escher-esque fashion. Another happens in a hallway. (Hey, Hollywood budgets do not have the luxury of infinity.) The special effects are so wondrous – and a little bit acid-infused – that an all-powerful being from another plane of existence at one point stops his villainy to ask, “What. Is. Happening?”, like he just happened upon a stupefying Tumblr post.

The script, by Derrickson and C. Robert Cargill, is slightly less innovative. In fact, it’s downright familiar, right down to the unclearly-intentioned villain and clunky plunge into the climactic battle. Apparently opening the doors of perception can't keep Marvel from doing what it always does.

The comedy feels especially forced. It doesn’t help that the naturally witty Cumberbatch – and his sonorous, so-British voice – is labouring under a higher-pitched American accent. We shouldn’t be increasing the degree of difficulty for natural performers. It’s like asking Matthew McConaughey to act with a shirt.

There is a fun recurring bit in which Strange is repeatedly referred to with different honorifics (as if the characters were knowingly avoiding the film’s title). “When you’re strange, no one remembers your name,” Jim Morrison once sang, yet our hero didn't bend the laws of space and time as well as our notions of reality to be called Mister.

Cumberbatch's preening, egotistical Strange will surely be a fun counter-weight to the Avengers in later instalments. However, opposite Swinton (oozing charm and comfort on screen), Chiwetel Ejiofor (as Karl Mordo, an honourable and intensely devoted student of the Ancient One) and Mikkelsen (darkly hypnotic), he can only ask that they don’t steal the picture from under him too enthusiastically.

McAdams, on the other hand, has very little to do; during surgery on Strange himself, the dude astral projects out of his body to mansplain the procedure to her. Similarly, Benedict Wong's Kamar-Taj librarian Wong is a man of few words, and it’s hard to tell if that’s indicative of the character’s generally quiet nature or indicative of the flick's pilfering of Eastern culture with little in return for its Asian inspirations. (Wong is the only major cast-member of Asian descent.)

There is much to like about Doctor Strange and plenty to complain about too, which, it’s fair to say, is the true Marvel formula revealing itself. (Buy the ticket, take the ride, temper expectations.)

Nonetheless, as far as big budget blockbusters go, few have supporting casts as impressively stacked as this one, and fewer still ask us to ponder our miniscule place in the universe, our wispy grasp of time and the ways in which our mortality both cripples us and ultimately frees us, all against a swirling, chimerical backdrop.

It also makes Hannibal’s Mads Mikkelsen an official Disney villain. What an infinitesimal period of time to be alive.

3.5/5

In cinemas now. Rated M for fantasy themes and violence.

Photo: Disney.