The multiverse sure is becoming a popular travel destination. Between the recent sleeper hit, Everything Everywhere All At Once, the latest season of Star Trek: Picard, and of course, Marvel’s recent fun with variants in Spider-Man: No Way Home, and the TV series Loki, everyone’s dabbling in alternate realities. This time, Doctor Strange gets multiversal when one of his variants helps to protect a young woman from a big scary CGI monster by hopping through realities. It’s not much of a premise for an entire movie, but even after Wanda Maximoff, the Scarlet Witch, gets involved, the story hardly grows much more sophisticated than that.

While the effects and production values have that MCU polish and shine, there was a lot of wasted potential in this movie. Starting with the multiverse itself (or should I be calling it the “multiverse of madness” — trust me, it’s not that mad), there are literally infinite possibilities when it comes to exploring variants and the idea of other realities. The aforementioned Everything Everywhere All At Once does a much better job of using the concept to develop characters by showing “what might have been” variants, along with wacky extreme variants. Even after Loki introduced us to the idea of character variants in a much more interesting way. After falling through a number of crazy realities, most of the movie has Strange hanging around a single alternate reality. Spider-Man: No Way Home made use of variants in an inventively “meta” way by reuniting us with past movie versions of characters. However, this movie decided to take the alternate reality an excuse to give us some surprise (continuity-safe) cameo appearances – lots of them. I’m not going to spoil those cameos, and they were a fun thing for fanboys like myself to see, but they were definitely not elements of satisfying storytelling or good script-writing. The idea of multiverse was also wasted by how contained most of the movie scenes were. Not only was Strange and America Chavez (the aforementioned young woman) mostly in a single alternate reality, they were mostly in a single building complex. Why waste a whole new universe when it could just as easily have been another country or even another city block that they had fled to?

While Benedict Cumberbatch is fine as Doctor Strange, I feel like none of the actors are really stretching themselves. I love Rachel McAdams, but even in the first movie I wasn’t sure she and Cumberbatch had much chemistry together. She’s an ally in this movie, but her performance was also not much to write home about. Newcomer Xochitl Gomez is serviceable as spunky fan-favourite America Chavez, but I don’t quite understand her character (and the movie doesn’t explain why she’s able to travel between universes, or why she’s unique in the multiverse). I wish I had known more about her character beforehand; maybe I would have appreciated her more.

One delightful surprise (aside from the cameos) was that since Sam Raimi was the director, not only did this movie have more of an action-adventure feel (though it was still bogged down by a lot of Wandavision‘s leftover emotional baggage), but we also said hello to a lot more of the undead. Raimi’s past as creator of the Evil Dead films really came through with a number of the scenes in this movie, including one where Strange conjures the dead and uses their spirits to help him in the climactic battle. I’m not a big fan of undead movies (or the scariness and creepiness built into them), but I did like that this movie felt far less burdened by “character development” and calls us back to when super-hero stories were just fun. There is virtually nothing of “everyday problems” in this movie, or dealing with secret identities being revealed and causing frustration and anxiety. Evil wants to destroy the multiverse for their own selfish reasons, and Good wants to stop them.

I know this review probably reads like one big long complaint, but the movie was actually kind of fun. It doesn’t take a lot of backstory knowledge to understand the plot, though that might help the enjoyment. It’s got its fair share of spills and chills. Plus, for followers of the MCU, the cameos (including one in the first of two post-credit scenes) raises all kinds of fan speculation and questions that are fun to think about. Similar to many of the other MCU sequels, this is an enjoyable, serviceable adventure. (3 out of 5)