Scott Derrickson folds New York like paper and gives Marvel its strangest pictures so far. Underneath them is the Iron Man story told again, with a villain who barely registers. Worth an evening for the sights; do not expect to be moved.
Dr. Stephen Strange (Benedict Cumberbatch) is a New York neurosurgeon who names the year of a pop song while he operates and keeps his watches in a drawer lit like a jeweller’s window. Then his car leaves a wet road, his hands are wrecked, and once the surgeons and the money have run out he goes to Kathmandu looking for a cure. Marvel has told this story before. Iron Man (2008) was also about a rich, clever, unpleasant man who is broken and rebuilt as a slightly less unpleasant one. What Scott Derrickson adds is sorcery, and with sorcery comes permission to fold buildings in half. The permission is the reason to watch.
The scene that won us over comes early, at Kamar-Taj. The Ancient One (Tilda Swinton), shaven-headed and unbothered, presses a palm to Strange’s chest, knocks his spirit out of his body and sends it through a run of places that do not obey the rules: a tunnel of hands sprouting from his own fingers, an eye the size of a planet, a long fall through colour. We sat forward and grinned like children, which is not something we do often once the Marvel logo has come up. The sequence runs longer than the studio usually allows itself, and it is better for that.
Charles Wood’s production design gives Kamar-Taj worn timber, a library with the books chained to the shelves and doors that open onto a snowfield or a London street. Alexandra Byrne’s costumes do quiet work: The Ancient One in saffron, the students in layered tunics and sashes, and a red cloak with a high collar that turns out to have opinions and is the best supporting character in the film. Benedict Wong, as the librarian Wong, refuses to laugh at a single one of Strange’s jokes and is the funniest thing in it. Chiwetel Ejiofor plays Mordo as a true believer and plays him straight, and the script gives him too little back.
The big set piece is a chase through a New York turned into a kaleidoscope, streets rotating, walls arriving where floors were, all of it inside a sealed copy of the city so that nobody has to explain the damage afterwards. Ben Davis keeps the camera steady while the city turns around it, and Sabrina Plisco and Wyatt Smith cut it so you always know which way is up when the film wants you to. Michael Giacchino’s score puts a harpsichord under the mayhem, a sixties touch for a character who began there.
Then there is Kaecilius. Mads Mikkelsen, with bruised purple make-up round his eyes, wants eternal life and says so in paragraphs, and gets one good joke about Strange’s name. Mikkelsen can frighten a room by lifting an eyebrow. Here he stands still and states his aims, and we were bored during his speeches and slightly cross about it, because the film had just shown us it could do anything and chose to do this. Rachel McAdams’s Dr. Christine Palmer is an emergency doctor who exists to stitch Strange up and look worried. Her one good scene, operating on his body while his spirit argues with her from the ceiling, suggests a livelier film that was not made. Michael Stuhlbarg’s Dr. Nicodemus West, a rival surgeon, gets two scenes.
Cumberbatch is right for the part. The American accent holds and the arrogance comes easily to him. What the script by Derrickson, Jon Spaihts and C. Robert Cargill does not manage is the change of heart. The Ancient One tells Strange that it is not about him, and a few scenes later it is not, and we are asked to take the difference on trust. The finale does something clever with time that we will not describe, and it is the wittiest idea in the film. It comes after a fight in Hong Kong in which so much is happening at once that we had stopped following which of it mattered.
Most critics liked this more than we did, and we understand why. After eight years of men in metal suits, a studio film that spends its money on M. C. Escher is a relief. The pictures are new; the story under them is not. It is 115 minutes, a 12A, and the cape gives the best performance.
