| Walt Disney Studios Motion Pictures | Release Date: May 6, 2022 | CRITIC SCORE DISTRIBUTION | ||
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Positive:
39
Mixed:
22
Negative:
4
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Critic Reviews
May 3, 2022
What Raimi has done with his contribution, however, is construct not another roller coaster but one hell of a haunted house, one fueled by an abundance of eccentric creativity, imagination, and finely honed chops. The methods he employs to his Madness are what makes this movie stick out, in this or any other universe.
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May 3, 2022
May 4, 2022
There’s an interesting tension at play within Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness, the strongest MCU outing since Black Panther, that’s nevertheless as much Marvel Machine as it is Raimi enjoying his return to the big screen after almost 10 years away, deploying every trick he keeps up his sleeve.
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May 3, 2022
Still, despite Olsen and the appealing breeziness of Cumberbatch, Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness is what it is, a superhero extravaganza with too many fight scenes. But director Sam Raimi doesn’t overplay them, and the creative visuals keep them from becoming monotonous.
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May 3, 2022
With the deadpan-great Benedict Cumberbatch effortlessly sliding back into the role of the brilliant and immensely powerful but sometimes shortsighted and narcissistic Doctor Stephen Strange and a bizarro plot that serves up philosophical, ethical and spiritual mind games in between the sometimes repetitive but slick and exhilarating action sequences, this is one of the weirder Marvel movies yet.
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May 3, 2022
What surprised me about Multiverse of Madness was how much fun Raimi was allowed to have in the middle of it, turning every action sequence into something quite inventive and even delivering some cheeky scares throughout. This many years into the Marvel experiment, I’m heartened to see space for a real genre auteur amid all the multiversal machinations.
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May 3, 2022
Give Sam Raimi a multiverse, and he will take a mile. The director's take on Doctor Strange feels like many disparate and often deeply confusing things — comedy, camp horror, maternal drama, sustained fireball — but it is also not like any other Marvel movie that came before it. And 23 films into the franchise, that's a wildly refreshing thing, even as the story careens off in more directions than the Kaiju-sized octo-beast who storms into an early scene, bashing its tentacles through small people and tall buildings like an envoy from some nightmare aquarium.
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May 3, 2022
Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness definitely makes good on the promises of an excessive title: Alternate realities are in full effect, things get progressively more bonkers, and the latest adventure for Benedict Cumberbatch’s Marvel magic man takes “the search for one’s self” conceit to a whole new level.
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May 3, 2022
Paired with Danny Elfman's fizzy score, Raimi elevates "Multiverse of Madness" from the bridge-building bit of IP it so transparently is. While he doesn't quite elevate it to the "madness" that the film promises, he does, for a few brief, shining moments, show the kids how those superhero movies could be done.
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PolygonMay 3, 2022
Raimi’s cinematic wizardry lends loads of dazzle to the pack of references and callbacks that make up a large part of the film’s middle. But strip away all the sparks, and Multiverse of Madness is simply leaning on the same cross-referential thrill-of-recognition joy-button that the Marvel Cinematic Universe has been frantically pressing for more than a decade now.
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May 3, 2022
“Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness” might be the most insanely Marvel movie ever, for good and ill. Unleashing the infinite possibilities of the multiverse throws open the studio’s toybox, but the anything-goes aspects of that can be alternately thrilling, disorienting and occasionally, a little silly. All told, this sequel proves highly entertaining, if not quite worthy of the pent-up demand for it.
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May 3, 2022
Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness is a mostly joyless exercise whose only saving grace is the mordantly silly touch of director Sam Raimi, who delivers ghouls, demons, necromancy, imaginatively surrealist backdrops and at least one rampaging monster that looks like it escaped from an episode of Mighty Morphin Power Rangers. For many, this is entertainment enough.
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The PlaylistMay 3, 2022
For all its emotional horrors—witnessing the worst of ourselves and hoping for the best versions of ourselves eventually triumph over our inherent faults—Multiverse of Madness is arguably lacking the humanity, the heart, and soul of Marvel that works so well when balanced with humor and spectacle.
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The GuardianMay 3, 2022
The multiverse madness is treated with genial high-energy panache, though I have to say that this infinite profusion of realities does not actually feel all that different in practice from the shapeshifting, retconning world of all the other Avengers films. And infinite realities tend to reduce the dramatic impact of any one single reality, and reduces what there is at stake in a given situation. Nonetheless, it’s handled with lightness and fun.
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The Film StageMay 4, 2022
This whole concoction plays like a battle of wills between its makers, a closet full of monsters being Trojan-horsed into brand synergy. The morbid joy Sam Raimi manages to induce here is undeniable. The madness, perhaps, is that he must manifest his violent delights through a content delivery system for babies.
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ColliderMay 3, 2022
As a film that highlights Raimi’s talents as both a director of distinct superhero stories, and idiosyncratic horror tales, Doctor Strange works. Yet as a larger piece in the ever-expanding Marvel Cinematic Universe, the Multiverse of Madness starts to show the cracks in trying to continually attempt to build and one-up what came before.
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May 9, 2022
What stirred the fans around me, causing them to levitate in their seats, was not the film’s emotional sway (for it has none) but the miraculous visitation of characters from other Marvel flicks, many of them played by embarrassed-looking British actors, whose every entrance was met with ejaculations of joy.
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May 4, 2022
Putting aside any long-term implications, The Multiverse of Madness is a frustrating mix of eclectic elements that at times feel more like Raimi referencing his Evil Dead movies than his previous superhero work. It’s undeniably fascinating and at times exhilarating but my overall feeling is one of vague disappointment.
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May 6, 2022
In Doctor Strange In The Multiverse Of Madness, Raimi seems to only be granted occasional cubes of autonomy, within which to shoot charmingly out-there set pieces with a characteristically bombastic score, and periodically remind us that he’s the guy who made Drag Me To Hell and Army Of Darkness.
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May 7, 2022
Unlike movies such as Black Panther and Shang-Chi, which functioned as self-contained entities, this film requires an encyclopedic knowledge of Marvel minutiae and world-class cross-referencing skills to fully work. And who, outside the diehard fanbase, has the bandwidth for that level of commitment?
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May 3, 2022
The film is not a dead loss. The sheer chaos of the thing is welcome in an age when big-budget films travel along too-straight lines. Raimi is allowed a few moments of characteristic invention. But nothing here suggests there is much room to manoeuvre within the Marvel straitjacket. A disappointment.
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The IndependentMay 3, 2022
It turns out that the point of the multiverse, and of Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness, isn’t its creative potential. It’s its cameos. A million universes could exist, and they’d all contain surprise appearances by people and things fans can hoot and holler over, before being purchased as toys on the way out of the cinema.
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The TelegraphMay 3, 2022
But the idea that Raimi’s signature touch amounts to rewarming old flourishes from his work over the last four decades is a wildly embarrassing and juvenile way to think about filmmaking: what you actually get here is the Marvel house style with Raimi flavouring sprinkled on top, and anything that feels outrageous only does so in the context of the franchise’s fussily restrictive rule set.
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