I don’t remember the build up to Spider-Man’s release in May 2002. The most awareness I had of it was something about a trailer that had to be recut because it had the World Trade Center in it. I was only about 15 at the time, just figuring out the internet, and way more tapped into TV than movies. I had no awareness of Sam Rami. I was still 7-8 years from seeing the Evil Dead movies. Knowing what I know now about him and his reputation, I’m pretty sure in 2002 I would’ve expected a movie a lot more like Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness than the Spider-Man we got. That’s not to say Spider-Man isn’t a Sam Rami movie. It’s absolutely is. It’s as frenetic and sincere as the rest of his movies. He did a great job with Spider-Man pivoting his skills into something else without losing what made him special. I could go on all day about how much I like that movie, but I should really focus on his new one.
Multiverse of Madness is Rami’s first movie in nearly a decade. Thanks to the MCU’s incredibly complex web of projects, it’s hard to call it a sequel to 2016’s Doctor Strange. There have been 13 films and 5 MCU shows in that time. Four films with Strange in them. A lot has happened and had Multiverse of Madness been a direct sequel, I doubt it would have had anywhere near the excitement. Doctor Strange is 18th of 28 MCU films at the box office, and that’s including several COVID-impacted releases. Like more of the Marvel films now, it’s the crossover potential that built the hype. Strange (Benedict Cumberbatch) was a key character in the winter’s mega-hit Spider-Man: No Way Home, so he’s fresh in the minds of the audience. This also features Elizabeth Olsen’s Scarlett Witch fresh off her own Disney+ series. Combine that with Sam Rami’s reputation with superhero films, and there was a lot to be excited about.
On the whole, I’d say the excitement was warranted. Sam Rami delivered a very competently-made superhero movie with even more of his own touches than in the Spider-Man trilogy. The film wastes no time getting into the plot when Strange is pulled away from a wedding to stop a creature that’s going after a teen girl. The girl is America Chavez played by Babysitter’s Club alum Xochitl Gomez. She’s being hunted because she has the ability to hop across the multi-verse into different realities. She doesn’t know how to control the power yet, but it’s a valuable power regardless. Strange goes to Wanda/Scarlett Witch for help and it turns out she’s behind it all. She’s desperate to go to a reality where the children she imagined in WandaVision are real. As you can imagine, this leads to Strange and Chavez doing some multi-verse hopping and meeting some alternate versions of familiar characters.
Sam Rami’s contributions are mainly in how dark and sometimes scary this film is. It’s not quite “Marvel’s first horror movie” as I’ve heard some suggest. First of all, if we’re calling this horror, then The New Mutants was also horror and got there first. Secondly, this is still an action movie first, only with horror elements. You really see the director of the Evil Dead in this. And let’s just say this movie features some of the grimmest deaths of any MCU film. All the Marvel movies do have to fit in a similar stylistic box, but I appreciate how often they actually do let filmmakers experiment. Sure, sometimes they need the Russo brothers excel at being invisible in something as unwieldy as an Avengers. Other times though, you get Guardians of the Galaxy, Thor Ragnarök, Captain America: The Winter Soldier, Eternals, or this which are very distinctive from each other. They brought in Sam Rami to be Sam Rami, and the result is something darkly cartoonish that I enjoyed a lot.
That said, this has to be one of the weakest stories in an MCU movie. This movie forces you into the plot right away. In some ways I appreciate that. Marvel movies are more product than art, so getting to the point can be nice. It really comes at the expense of Wanda, who sees all her earned complexity from WandaVision reduced to a crazed mama-bear character. As long as I’m looking to Rami, the movie is badly missing those solo Norman Osborn scenes where we see Wanda succumb to the dark magic. Instead, we’re expected to assume it happened and go with it. Once I did just accept that this is where Wanda is now, it’s a pretty cool movie. Marvel has always had a villain problem, so turning a hero into the villain is a nice movie. Scarlett Witch is a force. Once she’s established as the villain, the movie is mainly Strange and Chavez travelling across the multi-verse. Cumberbatch works well with a young sidekick. Mix that with the alt-history opportunities and some darker imagery and you have a pretty enjoyable movie.
Verdict: Strongly Recommend
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