Fast-moving, crowded film pits lots of Marvel super-heroes against lots of other Marvel super-heroes. The movie stays moderately zippy as it leaps from location to location. It also manages to bring Spider-man into the Marvel Cinematic Universe in fairly rousing fashion. Well, rousing if you enjoy seeing the increasingly dickish Iron Man practice child endangerment! It's really not a Captain America movie but rather a third (at the time) Avengers movie.
Black Panther gets introduced too, and ends up being one of the few voices of reason. All hail Wakanda!
Things go on about one super-hero battle too long, in part because the best part of the whole movie occurs during that second-to-last battle as the movie goes all-out comic book. Boy, though, the Vision's costume is terrible. If nothing else, the film suggests that Marvel's Damage Control comic, in which super-powered cleaners clean up the aftermaths of super-battles, should be turned into a movie franchise. Stat. Recommended.
A bit of a boiler-plate Marvel Movie (think Iron Man with magic instead of technology and you've pretty much got it) enlivened by some ambitiously loopy visuals, albeit some of them riffing on Inception and not anything in the Dr. Strange comic books themselves.
The changes to Dr. Strange's character make him a twin for Robert Downey Jr.'s snarky Tony Stark. That's faithful to the original comics version of pre-magic Dr. Strange, not so much for post-magical-training Dr. Strange, possibly early Marvel's least quippy hero -- even Reed Richards (or Sue Storm, for that matter) got off more zingers than Dr. Strange in the 1960's.
Created by writer-artist Steve 'Spider-man' Ditko, Dr. Strange's non-quippy gravitas probably makes him the Marvel character who would most benefit from a trade to DC Comics for, say, the Legion of Super-heroes.
Benedict Cumberbatch is fine as Dr. Strange, though his American accent is all kinds of weird. Chiwetel Ejiofor does nice work as a seriously reworked Mordo. Mads Mikkelsen plays the least interesting Marvel Movie villain since Mickey Rourke and Sam Rockwell in Iron Man 2. Rachel McAdams is stuck playing Natalie Portman in the Thor movies, only moreso.
The movie's visuals fail spectacularly at the end even as they also succeed admirably in translating Ditko's surreal comic-book visuals of the Dark Dimension into the movie world. To say that the visual redesign of Dr. Strange's greatest foe is regrettable is about the most praise I can offer. The poor bugger has been biggie-sized into a giant floating head that looks an awful lot like what would happen if you painted the Tron visuals for the Master Control Program onto an accordion.
As to the white-washing in regards to Asians... yep, one of Marvel's first prominent, 'good' Asian characters is no more. Doc's mentor, the ancient Asian known only as the Ancient One, is now the surprisingly spry Tilda Swinton, a.k.a. The Whitest Actress Ever. And the other tweaks made to the Ancient One's character don't help much either.
In other areas, the magic training Strange endures now has all the length and rigor of selecting icons off a computer screen. Really, it makes the Harry Potterverse seem like a world teeming with educational rigor by comparison. Doctor Strange just has to make funky Kung Fu moves -- no pronouncement of spells required.
And the mystical doodad Strange and friends need to travel through space-time? It's there to be dropped at a crucial moment, as these things always are. And it's called a 'Sling Ring,' thus recalling one of the lowest of low points in adaptations of Marvel comics to other media -- the laughable Thing animated show of the 1980's and the cry "Thing ring, do your thing!" On the bright side, the Wand of Watoomb makes a cameo and the Cloak of Levitation gains the personality of loyal dog. Lightly recommended.
