Dr Strange is a Marvel in a ripping yarn (and you’ll love the zombie!)
Dr Strange In The Multiverse Of Madness (12A, 126mins) Verdict: Bonkers and brilliant
ALWAYS satisfying to see a TV actor, an exSherlock Holmes no less, as a Hollywood superhero. And you can see why Marvel — for whom one cosmos is never enough — needs our Benedict Cumberbatch as sorcerer Dr Stephen Strange, trespasser in multiple universes. He has a suavely deadpan, slightly depressed look, like a camel with a secret sorrow.
As this ripping yarn opens, he leaps around giant nightmare pipework in space, battles fireballs, vaporises someone and puts his tie on by magic to attend a socialite New York wedding. From which he promptly leaps from a window to battle a huge octopus, rescue a teenager and slice a bus in half.
And that’s just the warm-up, before discovering that the kid — Xochitl Gomez as America Chavez — is a refugee between universes. It may be partly Strange’s fault about the parallel universes, because he breached natural laws in the 2021 film doing a favour for Spider-Man.
But hey, fantasy fiction has long been stepping through portals to other worlds from Narnia to Harry Potter’s Platform 9 ¾, so why not?
Elizabeth Olsen’s Scarlet Witch Wanda is back, this time refusing to cooperate as a goodie and get herself ‘back on the lunchboxes’ (good Marvel merchandising joke). She wants to kill young Chavez in order to return to whichever universe it was in which she last saw her imaginary children (cue glorious clunky line ‘I’m not a monster, I’m a mother’).
It is a massively entertaining two hours, even if, like me, you gave up superhero movies 50 years ago.
THIS is Marvel on amphetamines, with a pleasingly lunatic, scrapbag diversity of cultural references from every century, religion and Saturday matinee cliche.There are futuristic steel robots and a retro giant squid; telekinetic brain invasion and plain fisticuffs; a sacred Book of Ashanti and a rather sinister research institution.
There are ice fields and tunnels, mountains, caves, fortresses from ancient legends, stumping ogres from fairy tales and even the Illuminati
make an appearance.
And there’s good old Benedict with his ancient Chinese warrior archers. They have magic shields, but also bows and arrows and 16th-century lines such as: ‘It is an honour to court death alongside you once again.’
Marvel’s own history is nicely referenced, too, when all the old superheroes turn up as a sort of committee.
Oh, and there’s a zombie. You will really like the zombie. So elaborately decomposed yet so recognisable and sexily paternal.
There’s a new thing, too: dreamwalking between your other selves, which creates nice cod-psychiatric issues, because all superheroes are potentially prone to joining the dark side.
As for emotional issues there’s buried tragedy, sibling rivalry, pique, maternal grief, lost romance and for a tick in the LGBT box (young Ms Chavez has two Mommies — both mislaid in a wrong universe, but I’m sure they’ll be back).
I rather loved it. The landscapes are fabulous, especially Multiverse 838 where New York is covered in blossoming trees and the pizzas are spherical. There’s a really beautiful battle using musical notes as missiles and Cumberbatch throws himself around manfully.
Patrick Stewart has a cameo on a sort of weird yellow mobility vehicle, and newcomer Gomez (from The Baby-Sitters Club on Netflix) is a sweetie.
Moviegoers on dates will also nod ruefully when Strange says his love life is ‘complicated’ and the kid asks: ‘More complicated than being chased by a witch through the multiverse?’
Yes, he says. It is.