Arrogant surgeon Stephen Strange (Benedict Cumberbatch) damages his hands in a car accident and in desperation travels to the far East for mystical healing. There he finds The Ancient One (Tilda Swinton) and her sorcerer acolytes who defend the world from magical threats. The threat of the moment is from a rogue sorcerer (Mads Mikkelsen) who has stolen a forbidden ritual and plans to use it to open Earth to The Dark Dimension and to the giant demon that rules it.
The Marvel Cinematic Universe adds their mystical strand and as with the previous thirteen films, creates something worth your $16. Where Doctor Strange excels is in its fantasy action. The fight choreography is superb, being quick but clear and filled with the unexpected. Better still is the twisting cityscape and constantly changing background. This is Inception done right (or if you liked Inception, call it Inception done far, far better). Combatants spring onto ceilings, elongate floors, and wrestle in mid air as gravity shifts. Combine those with the acid trip moments of Strange opening his third eye and we’ve got the new king of drug movies.
The humor works, the characters are well defined, and the pace is brisk. Still, while you should head out to the theater to catch it, Doctor Strange is on the lower end of the MCU films. It is yet another origin story, and one a bit too familiar. Merge Iron Man with Nolan’s Batman Begins and you’ve got the outline. Besides the plot being old-hat, the problem is that Stephen Strange is unlikable, even with Cumberbatch doing a spot-on American accent. Tony Stark is a terrible human being when we meet him, but a fun one. You’d want to hang out with him at a party even as you were appalled with what he was doing to the world. That kind of reprobate works in a film. But Strange is a different kind of problematic person. He is unpleasant. He’s doing the right things but for the wrong reasons and is simply nasty or pointlessly argumentative in his personal life. This works much less well in a film, particularly as he isn’t given the time needed to either learn his new craft or come to his epiphany. It would have been far better to start with him already a hero and present what was absolutely necessary of his unsavory side in brief flashbacks.
So, Doctor Stange should have been better, but it is still quite good. The casting is excellent. Chiwetel Ejiofor embodies nobility and rigidity as Strange’s sometimes teacher, sometimes partner. Mikkelsen doesn’t have a lot to do but manages to fill his villain with menace while Benedict Wong, as the combat librarian, is perhaps the best sidekick in the MCU. Swinton, as the White sorcerer supreme, nails the guru bit, making the switch from the comic book’s racially Asian character not a problem for this film, but rather one for the entire MCU which is noticeably lacking in Asian heroes. Only Rachel McAdams is underwhelming, but she’s stuck as the girlfriend we barely see so I doubt anyone else could have made more of an impression.
I think it likely that Doctor Strange’s best moments will not be in this solo film, but in his future outings with other Avengers, and based on the first of the two post-credit sequences, I expect we’ll see him in such a situation quite soon.