Take Two Tuesday: Spider-Man: No Way Home (2021) ... or, look out, here comes (another) Spider-Man

I haven’t done a lot of “Take Two Tuesdays,” but when I started back in May 2014, I set my sights on The Amazing Spider-Man 2 and found that I liked it better than I thought. How appropriate, then, that I’m revisiting the “Take Two” premise with another Spider-Man film.

I’ve seen Spider-Man: No Way Home twice now on home video. With a 93% score on Rotten Tomatoes, nearly $2 billion in worldwide box office, and legions of fans declaring that it’s the best Marvel movie ever, Spider-Man: No Way Home isn’t actually very good. It’s entertaining enough, with flashes of brilliance, but it’s over-reliant on nostalgia with a story that doesn’t hang together. And were it not for the pure unadulterated charisma of its leading performers, No Way Home would be an unabashed flop. 

You’re going to need to have seen the film for me to talk about why it doesn’t work, so spoilers follow for No Way Home (and, really, every Spider-Man film that came before it). I compared No Way Home to Avengers: Endgame, in that “No Way Home finds itself as the unlikely apogee of the eight Spider-Man films that preceded it.” And I’ve thought about this idea a lot over the last five months, mulling the difference between Endgame (which was built as a climax) and No Way Home (which is merely masquerading as one). I think No Way Home tries very hard to be the next Endgame, especially if you’ve seen every Spider-Man movie in the last twenty years.

Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness (2022)

I’m a week late to the Multiverse of Madness party, partly because the first time that I saw the new Doctor Strange film, the power went out twenty minutes before the end of the film. After a lights-out impromptu intermission, I got to see the end of the film, and the theater made good with a complementary ticket to return. More to the point, though, I waited to review it because Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness was the first time in at least five movies and umpteen television series where I couldn’t wait to watch it again.
 
Put another way, I haven’t loved a Marvel movie like this in a great long while, and after having seen it twice, I’m pretty sure it’s hands-down my favorite Marvel movie since Avengers: Endgame.
 
Haunted by his surrender of the Time Stone and the consequences of returning to life after “the Blip,” Doctor Strange (Benedict Cumberbatch) finds his world flipped sideways when the literal girl of his dreams arrives. But America Chavez (Xochitl Gomez) tells the good doctor that those weren’t dreams – they were visions of his parallel selves. With an army of demons at their heels, Doctor Strange calls in help from the strongest magic-user he knows, Wanda Maximoff (Elizabeth Olsen), setting off on a journey across the multiverse.
 
I’ll concede that much of my post-pandemic relationship to Marvel has something to do with not seeing these films in packed, exuberant audiences, but my Doctor Strange crowd brought their moviegoing A-game. They laughed at all the right jokes, gasped in the appropriate places (including a particularly brilliant first-act twist), and hooted and hollered for the cameos. Even my No Way Home crowd was comparatively quieter compared to the raucous atmosphere in which we collectively entered the Multiverse of Madness. This is how one ought to see a Marvel movie; as Tony Stark once said (in Iron Man 2), “Oh, it’s good to be back!”
 
More to the point, though, Multiverse of Madness is such a strong entry in the Marvel Cinematic Universe because of its unique flavor and its (relatively) self-contained narrative. It’s part of a much larger canvas, true, and if you haven’t seen WandaVision yet, your mileage may vary on Wanda’s part of the story, but director Sam Raimi and screenwriter Michael Waldron keep the film relatively insular. There aren’t dangling plot threads or universe-serving big pictures at play; at its core, it’s largely a horror movie in which Doctor Strange is chased by shadowy distortions of his own controlling personality, while Wanda is dogged by her grief at the multitudes of losses she’s endured.
 
Everyone remembers Sam Raimi as the man who brought us Tobey Maguire’s Spider-Man trilogy, but let’s not forget his horror bona fides. And boy howdy, is this Doctor Strange a horror movie. Dutch angles and rapid zooms, jump scares and chase sequences straight out of a slasher film – it’s impossible not to appreciate the Raimi of it all, taking lessons he taught himself in things like Evil Dead and Darkman. Even the most mundane of establishing shots has something distinctively and idiosyncratically Raimi about it; indeed, there are some sequences that look like they were filmed on a GoPro attached to a vampire bat, a shot that practically screams, “Raimi!” What’s more, the film looks and thinks like a comic book. With crossfades and unconventional compositions, Multiverse of Madness feels like it was storyboarded directly from the comics. (Having Danny Elfman, arguably the most influential composer of the comic book movie genre, doesn’t hurt, especially in a symphonic chef’s-kiss of a battle amid the ruins of a parallel Sanctum Sanctorum. If you’ve seen it, you know exactly what I’m referencing.)
 
Benedict Cumberbatch joined the MCU at a time when the shared universe was poised to punch above its weight class. Frankly, he’s almost too good for the role, playing no fewer than five different Stranges, a scant forty days after his second Best Actor nomination at the Oscars. He’s clearly being groomed (if he’s not there already) for the Tony Stark center around which the rest of the Marvel Universe orbits, and he’s deftly up to the task, emotional and scary and all-powerful, without losing the ability to drop a good wisecrack or two. Elizabeth Olsen, though, very nearly steals the show as Wanda, now fully inheriting the mantle of the Scarlet Witch after the events of WandaVision. Olsen has always had fun as Wanda, and it really shows here as Raimi lets her lean into the character’s long history and peculiar physicality, all head cocks and intricate fingerwork (with just a pinch of a Sokovian accent). 
 
Meanwhile, it’s a great pleasure to see Benedict Wong back as Wong, now Sorcerer Supreme and stalwart arched eyebrow of the MCU. (To push the analogy, after appearances in Shang-Chi and Spider-Man: No Way Home, is Wong the new Nick Fury?) Amid all the other returning faces, including Rachel McAdams and Chiwetel Ejiofor – though not always in the way you’d be expecting – and a whole host of cameos that I wouldn’t spoil in a million years, there’s Xochitl Gomez as America Chavez. Comics enthusiasts can probably bet that we’ll see some kind of Young Avengers before too long, with Kate Bishop (Hawkeye) and Yelena Belova (Black Widow), and we can only hope that America Chavez is among them. She’s fun and spunky, not unlike Brec Bassinger’s recent turn as TV’s Stargirl, and her multiversal powers open up a whole new portal (pun intended) for future MCU shenanigans. 
 
Within the Multiverse of Madness, America lets us see scores of new worlds, familiar in a sideways kind of way, and much of the film’s second act involves a few surprise appearances facilitated by our journey into the multiverse. And unlike some films I could mention (more on that tomorrow), Sam Raimi holds the cameos at bay, preventing them from overwhelming the movie, even though he must surely hear the audience champing at the bit for more parallel worlds, more cameos, more interconnective tissue. Nay, says Raimi, the focus must be on the story at hand, a tight two-hour superhero horror flick that gives each of its main players a compelling arc. And it’s all done with a magician’s flourish, including one firing of Chekhov’s Gun that is so viscerally surprising and yet perfectly inevitable that I quite literally stamped my feet with glee when I realized how Raimi and Waldron had set the table for a delightfully creepy third act. (All the better that it’s using prosthetics more than CGI, an effect that seems straight out of Darkman.)
 
While I don’t know that I’ll ever love a Marvel movie as much as I love Captain America: The Winter Soldier (a perfect confluence of so many things), Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness really is the antidote to the Marvel malaise I’ve been feeling of late. Sure, I gave most of them good reviews, or at least fair to middling, but I haven’t rushed to rewatch any of them. (And indeed my opinion of one in particular has soured – but again, more on that tomorrow.) With this Doctor Strange, I fairly ran to the theater a week later. I should have known; leave it to the doctor to give you the medicine you need.
 

Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness is rated PG-13 for “intense sequences of violence and action, frightening images and some language.” Directed by Sam Raimi. Written by Michael Waldron. Based on the Marvel Comics. Starring Benedict Cumberbatch, Elizabeth Olsen, Chiwetel Ejiofor, Benedict Wong, Xochitl Gomez, and Rachel McAdams.