'Doctor Strange' Review

Director: Scott Derrickson
Cast: Benedict Cumberbatch, Tilda Swinton, Mads Mikkelsen, Chiwetel Ejiofor, Rachel McAdams
Release Date: 25th October 2016 (UK)

Stephen Strange is one of the world's most successful neurosurgeons on the planet and one of the most arrogant as well. But after an awful car crash leaves him with paralysis in his hands, Strange is left rejected by western medicine and goes out on a whim to Katmandu, Nepal in search of alternative treatment and finds more than he bargained for...

If you’ve heard anything about this film, you’ll have heard the comparisons: the city bending is like Inception, the magic training in Nepal is like Batman Begins and so on. And while these hold merit, in my opinion, it most closely resembles Ant-Man. It's notable at this point that Marvel has a formula. And, don’t get me wrong, it works. Each film from the studio for the past four years or so has found a way to balance comedy, drama and action so that the audience remains enthralled and entertained in a way that DC, for example, are struggling to pinpoint. And this is my main issue with Doctor Strange.

For a film that was marketed as being ‘original’, I found myself recognising the same mediocre villain, the same witty interactions between characters, the same internal debate of morality with the lead character. It’s all just the same. And while, for the moment, this isn’t too much of an issue (I still think the film deserves 3 stars), I’m wondering how long Marvel can keep this up before it becomes entirely tiresome. After all, if this film had been released in 2013, I would have given it four, maybe even five, stars without an issue but I left the screening with the overwhelming sense that I’d seen it all before.

The characterisation also struggles to work. Stephen Strange (Benedict Cumberbatch) is so detestably arrogant at the beginning of the film that you take an immediate dislike to him and he does little to improve this opinion throughout the course of the film. The Ancient One (Tilda Swinton) is, quite frankly, everything you would expect from a character called The Ancient One and the character arc they attempt to squeeze in to give her weight is entirely futile. Kaecilius (Mads Mikkelsen) is generic enough of a villain that he could’ve been Christopher Eccleston’s Malekith from Thor: The Dark World or Lee Pace’s Ronan from Guardians of the Galaxy- both of whom I had to google because their names had been long since forgotten. And Christine (Rachel McAdams) takes the biscuit for the most useless love interest possible- an utter waste of McAdams as an actress.

This lack of development, which is highly surprising from a studio dedicated to making multi-faceted characters, meant a lot of issues elsewhere in the film; there’s a big failure to connect on any emotional level and there were several times that jokes that would have caused heaps of laughter from someone such as Iron Man raised only a few meagre chuckles. As well as this, though the overall CGI was incredible and some of the best work I’ve ever seen, there were moments of green screen that were noticeably off-kilter.

Overall, the film does work. I have focussed mainly on the negatives here but I can’t say that I completely despised it and its definitely not a complete fall from grace for the franchise. However, thought it’s not bad, it’s certainly not the best and, as evident in what can only be described as the WORST Stan Lee cameo ever, it gives the impression of trying a little too hard to be “Marvel”.

★★★☆☆