Michael's Movie Grade: B+
An excellent sequel to an excellent Marvel film.
With this movie director Sam Raimi, manages to create something that is all his own while still making it clearly a Marvel film. With the exception of James Gunn, it is rare that you see any director fully leaving his/her own mark on a Marvel movie, but it is hard to view this as anything else but a Sam Rami film. Many of you know that besides his wonderful Spiderman movies, Sam Raimi is most famous for films like the Evil Dead movies or Drag Me to Hell (2009). These movies are horror movies but ones with a sense of self aware and a sense of fun. That is kind of what we get here. Though one would be hard-pressed to call this a horror film, it is certainly darker and creepier than anything seen in an MCU movie before this. Some of these scenes are truly creepy and feel like they could have come straight out of one of Sam Raimi's horror movie. This film may be rated PG-13 but it certainly pushes what you can do with that rating with both violence and scariness. Meanwhile his twisted and dark sense of humor also abounds, which is especially evident in the climactic scene. This works great as this movie has some truly great laughs. With all this in mind, Raimi makes this movie a visual treat that is oftentimes simply breathtaking to look at and makes this movie stand out very well from other Marvel films. To those who want to get away from the Marvel formula this can come off as a breath of fresh air. While I still enjoy the Marvel formula, I have to admit that this movie brings a nice change of pace. Yet none of this goes too far to make it lack what we love from other Marvel movies. The secret to the best Marvel movies is that the characters should be the heart and soul of the story and that is true here. This movie gives Doctor Strange an emotional journey that we can all relate to. There are times that our hearts truly break for this character and we can't help but wish things had turned out differently for him. His relationship with the new character of America Chavez (Xochitl Gomez) is also pretty touching and makes this film all the more emotionally effective. Even Scarlett Witch, whose actions can be anything but admirable is someone who we can understand where her pain comes from and how she could fall into temptation. Of course it is impossible to write about a movie with a score by Danny Elfman and not praise the music and he does a fantastic job here.
This movie does have its faults though. One distracting but minor one is that the dialogue for some small kid characters feel very forced and overly syrupy. I understand why these is this forced kind of cutesy dialogue here, but it simply doesn't work. The opening scenes of this film involve us catching up with the characters we haven't seen since the first Doctor Strange movie. These scenes go by a bit too fast and feel really rushed. As someone who loved the first Doctor Strange movie, this was especially disappointing. There is also some dialogue in here that feels overly expository.
All in all this movie was a whole lot of fun and managed to have its own identity while still clearly being a Marvel film.
P.S. Being a Disney buff, I was delighted to see Oswald the Lucky Rabbit on the TV some characters were watching.
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