Dr. Strange and the Multiverse of Madness

The Mother of All Evil

or

Night of the Walking Stranges

 

Dr. Strange (Benedict Cumberbatch) is not having a good night. In another of those loopy dimensions he goes into every so often that tumble and disorient you, he is trying to get to a mysterious glowing pedestal that will solve all of their problems. 

 

They? Yeah, he has with him a 'tween (Xochitl Gomez) in a star-patched jeans jacket, who supposedly has powers but currently is just having issues keeping her feet. They are being pursued by some "thing" or other (standard Marvel description: "it sure is BIG!") and Strange is hanging on by his pony-tail (he has a pony-tail?) in the fight and makes the decision to sacrifice the kid's powers in order to tray and get them out of it. Woops, bad move. It doesn't work and Strange is killed and the kid gets thrown into another Universe and it looks like the movie, Dr. Strange and the Multiverse of Madness, is over before it even gets started.

 

Damn "in media res," anyway! 

No, sorry. It was all just a terrible dream. Yeah. He's a wizard. They don't just have "dreams." Something's going on, and it's not until the good doctor attends the wedding of former flame Dr. Christine Palmer (Rachel McAdams), which is a real nightmare for him, that he begins to think there might be something more to this. Christine cuts him down a peg or two by telling him "You always have to be the one with the knife" (which will have some significance later on), and then the reception is crashed by a one-eyed octopus causing a ruckus out in the streets of NYC.

Strange and the Earth's Sorcerer Supreme Wong (Benedict Wong) do battle with the thing and dang if the focus of cycloptopus is the 'tween in a star-patched jeans jacket whose name is America Chavez—this creates a synaptic issue whenever someone says "We've got to save America" and I think we're about to see some canvassing of neighborhoods. A post-octopicide talk with America reveals that she's from another part of the multi-verse, another dimensional version of our space-time, and her super-power is that she can travel between those dimensions, with, she confesses, little control about where she ends up—GPS being on the fritz or something. Strange deja vu's that this was the kid from his dream and they find the body of the other-dimensional Strange and the strange doctor concludes that "dreams are merely windows into our multi-versal selves." Before they can question whether that has been peer-reviewed, they discover markings on the calamari shards of the creature, which are recognized as rune markings and Strange decides to visit another Marvel mage, Wanda Maximus (Elizabeth Olsen), former Avenger, who has been going through her own crises on "Wandavision."

At this point, the exposition should stop or it'll turn as spoilery as Strange's spell in Spider-man: No Way Home. Leave it that things get complicated and that the opening to other Earths and other existences provide motivations, certainly to issues that remain unresolved, and complications. To its credit, the movie does a good enough job of expositioning that you don't feel you HAVE to have seen "Wandavision" or subscribe to Disney+. We get to meet a couple of other distinctive Strange's, another Wanda, a planet that has their own sort of Avengers called The Illuminati (which contains some giddiness-inducing fan-service of what comprises that group and who they are portrayed by—just don't get attached), and there's a marvelously done scene—reminiscent of Spider-man: Into the Spider-verse—that has Strange and America portaling through meta-verse after meta-verse that is marvelously creative for the 45 seconds or so that it lasts.

The best thing about the movie, though, is that director Sam Raimi is back. No, he didn't do the first one— did that—but Raimi did the first three live-action Spider-man movies and basically wrote the template for the Marvel movies, which they would do well to study if they want to make films of innovation and energy. 

It's apparent very early in the film that his style is missed—his movies, be they action or horror, always had a delirious edge to them that would invoke responses of either horror or humor, a cinematic glee embedded in their mise en scène and montage. It's an added zhuzh to the proceedings, just a propulsive nudge with a wink, a comedic snap, that other Marvel movies just don't have. It's at once an acknowledgment of the goofiness behind the super-hero concept (and that we should take it SO seriously), while also trying to push the peril and make it visceral (so that we DO take it seriously).

It's a hold-over from Raimi's origins in horror (as is a cameo from Bruce Campbell!) where the purpose is to make the "horrible" entertaining, but not so entertaining that you dismiss the darkness and the threat that the film-maker means to describe. You can have the "giggle", but it's better that you have it after a jolt, the directorial "gotcha" rewarded by the communal admission that the audience is vulnerable ("yeah I'm only human—you got me") and can be won over. 

Every movie—every theater-piece—is like that. It's a battle to win over the audience. And one can do that either by playing it safe with fan-service (and this movie is guilty of that, certainly) or by challenging—not placating—the audience in order to win its respect. Raimi is still very much of that old school (oh, he'd hate that term!) and after his box-office disappointments with Spider-Man 3 and Oz The Great and Powerful, he hasn't had a feature film made and released for 9 years. And as much as I trashed those movies, I have to say, it's good to have him back.

For all the plot contrivances, and the attempts to gin up emotional drama, DrS&MOM (oh, that's funny...) is a good ride where you don't think about those things while you're being manipulated so well. It helps that Elizabeth Olsen is a scary-good actor and that there's a good cast of great thesp's lending support all along the way.

 

It's a big improvement over the first one.

"Eyes will pop out of your brain...when you're Strange"

Logan

Just Claws
or
That Old Man Logan...He Just Keeps "Shnikting" Along...

The X-Men series of films have had their good and bad editions, while the off-shoots of the most popular character from the comics and the films—Hugh Jackman's Wolverine—haven't had a really good film at all.

Until now.

Better late than never, I say, and it's extremely fortunate in that Jackman has stated Logan is his last appearance as Wolverine (yeah, we'll see...never say never). What is ironic is that, in this last Wolverine film, the best thing about it is that it strays from X-Men lore and comes up with a new concept that takes risks, if only because there is no continuity that needs to be saved and no sequel that degrades the stakes the character must overcome by ensuring his return. Logan treads No-X-Man's Land and that territory bears no marks of previous vehicles and feels as entirely fresh as an open road. 

The year is 2029 and all the X-Men are dead. No mutants have appeared in their wake. Their evolutionary pace has been stilled. John Howlett (Jackman) is making his way through life as a limousine driver-for-hire. He's older and not much wiser, suffering now from years of wounds as his healing powers are starting to shut down, while the adamantium lacing his bones is slowly killing him and he keeps himself going through the pain with pills and booze. His fares are enough to allow him to purchase special drugs from a surreptitious hospital contact.* But, they're not for him. They're for a special patient being secreted in Mexico.

That patient is Charles Xavier (Patrick Stewart), former head of the Xavier School for Gifted Children. Elderly now, and suffering from dementia, the old Professor X needs to be heavily sedated, or his mental powers, now erratic, will cause seizures that will paralyze everyone in a very large area surrounding him. One such seizure killed the last remaining X-Men and Xavier is wracked by guilt and depression. He is kept medicated and watched over by Caliban (Stephen Merchant), an albino mutant-tracker, who must stay out of the sun or face debilitating burns.

But, Wolverine is being triangulated: first, he is being sought out by a nurse named Gabriela (Elizabeth Rodriguez), who has with her a young girl named Laura (Dafne Keen)—Gabriela wants to hire Logan to take them to Canada where a secret facility named "Eden" can protect them; the second is Donald Pierce (Boyd Holbrook), a "modified" security agent for an organization named "Alkili Transigen" who is also looking for Gabriela, if only to find Laura, and knows that Logan has been contacted by her. He also seems to know that Professor X is in Mexico and has a great interest in him, as well.

Before you know it, Gabriela is dead, and all parties are in Mexico duking it out, and it is only then that the truth about Laura is known—she is a mutant, raised in the facility of Alkili Transigen to create a new line of weaponized "muties" bred from the ones who have gone before, and she has been cloned from a very specific DNA strain—Logan's. She has the healing powers and the claws, but being female, has a bit more—as in nature, the claws in her hands are for attack, but the ones in her feet, are for defense. Laura, designated "X-23," is a fighting machine, and her skills are ferocious and often devious.

A prolonged attack in Mexico sets the mutants on the run, ostensibly to Canada, but, for the short term, out of the way of Pierce and Transigen's gang of bio-mechanically enhanced "Rievers." But, they're never too far away, having captured Caliban and torturing him to track the fugitives. At the same time, Logan the loner must learn to deal with the possibility of being a reluctant hero for the ones under his charge, something he resists for all the death and destruction in his wake; as he tells Laura, "Bad shit happens to people I care about" "Then I'll be fine," is her aware reply..

It is the best of the Wolverine films, and it might be the best of the X-Men films (they've all blurred in my head these days). Since their inception (X-ception?), Marvel's mutant movies have been plagued by a fuzziness that has more to do with the inability to focus on any one member or conflict because the things are stacked from fade-in to fade-out with too many characters all demanding some amount of screen-time (you can see the same thing happening with the Avengers line of films, only two in). Here, Logan doesn't spend the whole movie ignoring the platitudes of dozens of pep-talkers, it's just him being "Mad Max" wrestling with his own conscience to get in the fight rather than being lectured to, constantly. Just as sure as the adamantium inside is killing him, he's shredding himself internally over his reluctance to commit.

Perhaps taking some courage from the box-office of Deadpool (there is a short, goofy interlude featuring that character pre-film), Logan is rated R—and a hard R—for violence and pervasive shnikting.** It is a problem with the X-Men films—and Wolverine in particular—that this most popular character is also the most violent, slashing, carving, dicing, gashing, eviscerating, and disembowling anything that comes across his path. The comics get away with it by showing the side of the victim that isn't being shredded or by hiding it in a swing-arc. The movies get away with it by keeping the action off-frame or (dare I say it?) "cutting away," thus (dare I say it again?) "under-cutting" the character and his ginzu-power. Logan's Wolverine cuts off hands, heads, guts people, rams his claws into eyes, foreheads and delivers one nasty upper-cut. 

"One nasty uppercut." They should have named him "Pierce"

...and curses like a sailor with a limited vocabulary. But, it's the surgeries that earned the rating. It lends the movie and the character a bit more desperation than we've seen previously and, in so doing, raises the stakes (ouch...can't get away from the puns) of the film.

Director James Mangold did the last unimpressive 'Wolverine-in-Japan" film which managed to not bring to mind any of the strong iconography of the comics in that setting. Here, however, telling a more personal story, with a much-weakened character and with less X-ephemera, that works far better than any previous attempts. And he ends it with a late, craggy Johnny Cash song (not "Hurt" as in the trailers—Mangold directed Walk the Line, the very good Cash bio-pic, by the way) that couldn't be more apt as a coda. Logan is tough and tender, and finally, does the character some justice, and makes the task of replacing Jackman a little bit more daunting. Good on them.

* And, seemingly, an endless supply of gasoline. That limo gets a lot of miles on it, and it's mileage must be incredible, as we never, ever see Logan fill the tank.

** I know, it's supposed to be "SNIKT!" but I was a sound-designer, dude, and when those claws go through wolverine's knuckle skin, it's going to make a "sch" sound so I think it's "SHNIKT!"

The Doctor and the Devils

The Doctor and the Devils (Freddie Francis, 1985) The film company Brooksfilms (established by Mel Brooks) had a bi-polar streak to it. Yes, they would do comedies, of course, like Mel's movies and To Be or Not To Be and My Favorite Year. But they would also make projects of The Elephant Man (the first studio film directed by David Lynch—now, there was a gamble), the Frances farmer biography Frances, and this film, adapted from a literary rarity, an original screenplay by Dylan Thomas (written in 1953), based on the true story of the mercenary ghouls Burke and Hare, who, starting in the year 1827, developed a lucrative trade in killing locals in Edinburgh and selling the corpses to an anatomy professor for display in his lectures.

The script was adapted by Ronald Harwood and the film directed by legendary British cinematographer Freddie Francis (The Innocents, The French Lieutenant's Woman, Glory, as well as The Elephant Man, Dune and The Straight Story for Lynch, and Cape Fear for Martin Scorsese). 

One can't say anyone scrimped on the cast. For all the loathsomeness of the subject matter, it attracted a great crew of British thespians with Jonathan Pryce and Stephen Rea as the psuedonymed Robert Fallon and Timothy Broom, who would liquor their victims up and then suffocate them for the betterment of science. Their customer is Dr. Thomas Rock (Timothy Dalton, just before his Bond years), who in some twisted idealism, looks the other way at the subjects brought to him by Fallon and Broom. He is opposed, and looked on with suspicion, at the Institute by Professor Macklin (played by a pre-Trek Patrick Stewart) and supported there by Dr. Murray (Julian Sands) who has his own secrets—he is in love with a bar-doxie (Twiggy), who may become one of the potential victims.

Great cast, maybe, but great movie it is not, despite the pains taken to present the squalor of London, both upstairs and downstairs. After starting out as a cinematographer, Francis became a director, doing a lot of pictures for Britain's Hammer Studios, a good prep for his work on this. It is atmospheric, alright, with a low-level discomfiture throughout, with Fallon and Broom being the lowest of the low, preying on the sick, weak and debilitated, and Rock turning a blind eye to the source (grave-robbing at best) of his demonstration subjects. 

There is a very large irony inherent in the script, not to far afield from the one Richard Matheson employed in "I Am Legend." But, the script, whatever it's pedigree (Harwood is an Oscar-winner, Dylan Thomas a writing legend) is the film's true down-fall.  It might seem a bit leaning to the pedestrian to say this, but there is no one to root for in all this, no one to sympathize with—not even the victims—and one watches with a dis-interest in the outcomes...for anyone.

There might have been a real reason no one dug up this script for so long.

X-Men: Days of Future Past

Class-Reunion
or
"Well, It's Complicated..." (All My X's Live in Excess)

Bryan Singer returns to the super-hero franchise he started 14 years ago, and abandoned to make the almost fetishistic Superman Returns leaving "The X-men" in the hands of director Brett Ratner to the series' detriment. It was given a shot of mutated adrenaline a couple years back with Matthew Vaughn's spirited re-boot, X-Men: First Class, which had fun re-tooling the series' DNA, featured some inspired re-casting, and also had a bit of fun poking fun at the film's 60's setting .

Now, as if to atone, Singer is back and has combined both versions of the X-men series (Vaughn was going to direct, but begged off to helm previous collaborator Mark Millar's new The Secret Service adaptation) in X-Men: Days of Future Past—somewhat based on the storyline by writer Chris Claremont and artist John Byrne (the major difference being that Kitty Pryde (Ellen Page) does not go back into the past to set things right, Wolverine (Hugh Jackman) does, presumably because the character is so popular—popular enough to have his own rather unexciting film series—that the film-makers hedge their bets by using their "big gun." Page's Pryde merely provides the transportation, spending the entire movie hovering over Jackman in what seems like a waste of the character and the actress.

"I see bell-bottom pants!!"

The movie revolves around events that we've not been privy to in the previous "X-men" movies. Since 1973, the American government has had a program in place to take care of the "mutant" problem; an American industrialist, Bolivar Trask (Peter Dinklage, at rather low wattage) has designed a squad of robots, the Sentinels, to eradicate all "muties," using information he's acquired studying the blood of one mutant in particular, "Mystique," the shape-shifting assassin Raven Darkhölme, originally played by Rebecca Romijn, and for the past played by Jennifer Lawrence.  Her murder of Trask in '73 accelerated the program, and has led to a genocide of all mutants...and quite a few humans suspected of it. 

Pres. Nixon (Mark Camacho) rolls out the Sentinels in 1973

Now, in the present day, when the Earth is devastated by the results of the Sentinel war, only a solid paragraph of them are left, led by Professor X (Patrick Stewart), Magneto (Ian McKellan), Storm (Halle Berry), Wolverine, Pryde, as well as previously seen X'ers Collossus (Daniel Cudmore), Iceman (Shawn Ashmore), Sunspot (Adan Canto), Warpath (Booboo Stewart), Blink (Bingbing Fan) and a new member, Bishop (Omar Sy). We watch as most of them are taken out by Sentinels with the ability to absorb mutant powers, giving Kitty and Bishop enough time to transport their consciousnesses back in time to warn their younger selves that the attack will take place to avoid it.

Sunspot takes on a Sentinel: Forget this ever happened because it didn't.

A neat trick that.  But one wonders where the duplicate Kitty's and Bishop's are. (Answer: there aren't any, their consciousnesses only went back and erases all presence of their existence at that point in time and place, but then the Sentinels shouldn't be there, either, as there's no reason for them to be). One wonders, also, why we've never heard of any Sentinels in the previous X-movies, considering they've been around since 1973. One can explain it away by saying, it only happened because X-Men: First Class happened—even though it should have happened, anyway—or one can presume that each movie is its own pocket universe, separate and distinct from the others, except that we've seen events from this series affect other events in subsequent films (they're even reprised here in flash-backs) and...

Well, it's about this time that one should suffer a headache like you have an adamantium claw stabbing through your skull—I began to ponder why Daniel Craig has never run into Sean Connery, but that's another series and another alternate universe—and one should really focus on the film, despite the fact it has worm-holes and fluctuations in the space-time-film continuum you could drive a Sentinel transport through.

This did happen in X-Men: First Class because they mention it in X: DOFP

Besides, you could miss some neat stuff. Let's just say that Wolverine goes back in time (his consciousness, katra, ch'i, whatever) to try and talk some sense into Charles Xavier/Professor X (James McAvoy) and Erik Lehnsherr/Magneto (Michael Fassbender) and maybe knock Mystique's Trask-targeted bullet out of the air, to stop the Sentinels before they start. Going back to the overgrown School for Gifted Youngsters, he finds a disengaged Charles Xavier, giving up his powers for the use of his legs by way of a serum taken from the blood of the Beast (Nicholas Hoult), who is care-taking him. Wolverine being Wolverine, this leads to a fight—he seems to fight with everybody here—before persuading Xavier, Beast and a young mutant named Peter Maximoff (Evan Peters) to break Magneto out of a non-metal high-security prison deep underneath the Pentagon. This leads to the best sequence of the film: Maximoff is "Quicksilver," a teen-aged speedster who does everything very, very fast; in the blink of an eye, he can do dozens of things while we, the normally-paced, are just starting the thought of it.

The Quicksilver messenger service

In the midst of the Magneto-break, Pentagon guards burst in with their plastic guns (which Magneto can't manipulate). As Maximoff puts the ear-buds of his Walkman (not invented until 1978, but then he's very quick) into his ears, the guards fire, and Maximoff takes off, running around the room, literally around the circular room, the images super-slowed down, so we can see everything he's doing to foil the guards. Set to a dreamily perfect song (from 1972 and I won't spoil it, although I'm not so sure Maximoff would listen to it), the scene is perfect and may be the best representation of super-speed put on film (and hey, I was a fan of The Flash, growing up), done with a reckless glee and amusing execution. 

The nearly-nude Mystique's action scenes need to be very carefully 
choreographed, even in the Nixon Oval Office.

Would that the rest of the film live up to that sequence. But, as you can guess from earlier in the review, there's a lot of stuff going on, some of it rather arcane, a lot of which we have to take on faith. And Singer is not the most reliable director for that, quite deliberately. His M.O. is to withhold information, to disguise intentions, and, often, to go for the highly dramatic just to pull the plug on it, ramp up the tension...and needlessly. Watch how he handles Wolverine's slashing and stabbing of victims (off-screen), how he shows the nearly naked Mystique in battle (mostly from the top, and if any leg action is required, everything waist-level is kept in darkness (even in well-lighted rooms—one can't veer from a PG-13 rating) Time-travel is his perfect trick, because he can do something over-the-top and then say "see, it never happened." 

Meeting of the X-minds: McAvoy and Stewart play the same role in different times.

Which leads me to suspect the motivation for doing this film—and this story—to begin with. Why this one, and why now? The answer must be with Singer's presence directing. It's been stated that this one is the "last hurrah" for the original "X-men" cast (they'll continue with the "First Class" McAvoy, Fassbender and Lawrence) and one must admit that Ian McKellen is indeed getting a little long-in-the-tooth to be cavorting around and levitating. I suspect that this was Singer's chance to "make things right," using the time-travel scenario as the catalyst to tweak the X-men Universe. He does more than that, for this film and the entire series, in a coda that cures all sorts of Wolverine's flash-backs from this film. Maybe it is atonement, after all.*  

But, in its sloppy rush to a satisfying ending, it left me with a bunch of questions. Does Wolverine have his metal claws back (he had the adamantium sucked out of him in the last "Wolverine" movie, and has bone claws throughout this one)? Is this the last we've seen of the Sentinels? Did Magneto cause the gaps in Nixon's secret tapes? Just how many people can they pack into an X-men movie (including cameo's?) Do I toss the old X-men movies in my DVD collection since this one makes them mute..uh, moot? 

To paraphrase The Usual Suspects: Is the greatest trick Bryan Singer ever pulled to convince the world they don't exist?**

Roll-call (L->R): Colossus, Blink, Sunspot, Quicksilver, Rogue, Charles Xavier (the younger), Iceman, Magneto, Wolverine, 
Magneto (the younger), Mystique, Professor X, Beast (the younger), Storm, Kitty Pryde, Warpath, Bishop
 (and believe it or not, they left "a couple" out).
Clip and save for reference in the theater.

* Which makes it doubly appropriate that James McAvoy is here.

** And, oh yes, there is an "End-Credits coda" but unless you brought a "Marvel-zombie" to the theater with you, there is no way you will understand it.