What If... Doctor Strange Lost His Heart Instead of His Hands?

 "Stephen, this path only leads to darkness and the end of this reality."

This episode is very good: a timey-wimey tale of another universe's Doctor Strange, one who lost not his hands in the crash, but his beloved Christine, and whose obsession to bring back his love eventually destroys the universe in exactly the sort of hubristic act we know Strange is pretty much capable of- that's the tension that makes the character so bloody good.

There's so much to enjoy here. Strange's desperate Groundhog Day moment as he attempts to save Christine again and again, only for every conceivable alternative to result in her death. The revelation that the Ancient One has split Strange into two. Strange's horrified realisation of what he has done. And, for the first time, an interaction with the inscrutable Watcher as he begs for help only to be told the Watcher, as ever, "cannot interfere".

Well, except when he can. I bet we will ultimately see that happen.

Overall this is an excellent bit of telly, full of heart and imagination. It is, perhaps, just a little too reminiscent of Steven Moffat's writing, particularly on Doctor Who, not to have been quite clearly influenced, but nevertheless I very much enjoyed this.

Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness (2022)

 "This time it's gonna take more than killing me to kill me."

Well, thgis film blew me away. It's a huge fanwank treat. It's very Sam Raimi indeed. I love its continuation of the whole vibe of magic being really trippy, man, in the MCU, almost as thought it was some king of metaphor or something.

But, although very good, this film isn't great. It doesn't quite have the swagger and smooth greatness of the best Marvel films but- let me stress- this is no great critiscism. Merely being very good indeedcis no crime.

Plus, this film may be fanwank, but it's fanwank of the first degree. Rintrah! Clea at the end! A brief CGI hint of the Living Tribunal! Chthon! Earth 616!

But this is about the full realisation of the Multiverse- Black Bolt! Captain Carter! Reed Richards! Confirmation, for those of my generation, that Monica Rambeau is THE real Captain Marvel. And we have Professor X... played by Patrick Stewart"! This is a blatant tease about the former Fox properties, using the concept of the Multiverse to the full.

Yet this film is very human as well as high concept. We explore, through different realities, Strange's relations with Christine, and his rather lovely fatherly relationship with the orphaned America Chavez, presumably a comics character from after my time.

Yet also, after WandaVision, we meet Wanda... and she's the baddie, plausibly yet tragically: she's a loving parent, able to see her beloved children only through snatched, one dimensional, dreamlike moments which are better than nothing but no replacement for everyday physical parenthood. I get exactly where she's coming from. It means a lot that she does the right thing, in the end, through love of her children.

No, this isn't a great film. But just being bloody good is no crime.

Doctor Strange (2016)

"What's this? My mantra?"

"It's the wi-fi password. We're not savages."

This may not be the best Marvel film ever, perhaps. It's not even the second best I've seen this year. But you know what? It doesn't need to be. Yes, it may be a fairly standard fantasy/sci-fi plot to the point that you know the Ancient One's going to die because Obi-Wan Kenobi, but it's standard stuff done very well, shot superbly with some splendidly trippy and Ditko-esque magic special effects and the perfect Stephen Strange in Benedict Cumberbatch, who not only plays the character superbly but looks exactly like him. There's no witty dialogue, which is odd for a Marvel film, but the brilliantly stylised and trippy direction and effects really elevate the film visually.

The Escher-esque weirdness with the cityscapes of London and New York is what I'll probably remember most from a film with a deliberately predictable plot, but the film just looks and feels exactly as Doctor Strange should. It feels trippy, Ditko and as psychedelic as the snippet of Pink Floyd's "Interstellar Overdrive" that we hear at the start. It doesn't feel like a Marvel film, but then Doctor Strange never felt much like the Marvel Universe anyway.

So, yes, an average Marvel film, if very far from a typical one. But Marvel set the bar high, and an average film of theirs is well worth seeing.

Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows (2011)

“I’m on my honeymoon!!!!”

I’m not going to repeat the things I said about Guy Ritchie’s distinctive directorial style in my blog review for this film’s prequel. Nor am I going to point out that this is pretty much an action film version of Sherlock Holmes (though this film emphasises this less), or that Robert Downey Jr is ridiculously good here and undoubtedly the greatest leading man working in Hollywood today. Yes, he’s even a bit better than Johnny Depp. He’s that good.

This film is far more respectful of the source material than its predecessor. Although not exactly a version of The Final Problem, it borrows from it heavily, including the apparent deaths of Holmes and Moriarty at the Reichenbach Falls, although of course we’re not expected to believe that Holmes actually died. Are you listening, Steven Moffat and Mark Gatiss? If that wasn’t enough, Stephen Fry gives us a version of Mycroft which is both extremely entertaining and extremely faithful to the source material.

Moriarty’s dastardly scheme is delightfully nefarious, if a little dependent on the writers’ knowledge that the First World War would break out twenty three years after the end of the film. Moriarty’s plans to make a gun running fortune from a massive war gives us a good excuse for lots of big budget hijinks as Holmes and Watson speed through France, Germany and, of course, Switzerland.

The bromance between Holmes and Watson is handled rather hilariously, with best man Holmes not being best pleased about Watson’s upcoming marriage. This nice little character point gives Downey a chance to show what a great actor he is, and gives Jude Law a chance to show what, in my opinion, a great actor he isn’t. Jared Harris is a surprisingly middling Moriarty, and one surprisingly faithful to what little references there were to the character in the regional stories. In fact, this faithfulness is taken a little too far: is there really any need to include Colonel Sebastian Moran? Incidentally, doesn’t Moran sound a bit common for a colonel in the Victorian army?

Still, this is enormous fun to watch, if slightly long, and I have to admit it was excellent. In fact, I would admit this film to that elite club of sequels that are better than their originals.

Sherlock Holmes (2009)

“No girl wants to marry a doctor who can’t tell if a man’s dead or not.”

Before you buy this DVD on film, you might want to consider that it forces you to watch an advert for Blu-Ray lasting several minutes before you get to the menu. This is unacceptable, frankly, and if, unlike me, you don’t prefer your films with subtitles, you’d be much better off recording it off the telly.

Not that my first film to be reviewed in 2012 is particularly great, although Robert Downey Jr’s superlative central performance and Guy Ritchie’s brilliantly executed set pieces make it well worth seeing anyway. It’s a nice idea- Sherlock Holmes as action film- which actually works quite well. Downey’s Holmes is decidedly bohemian, physical, fast-moving and decidedly not asexual, and while this is arguably a departure from “canon”, it’s no more so than many more boring interpretations. And this treatment of the Sherlockian world may not be as good, quality-wise, as Steven Moffat and Mark Gatiss’ superlative Sherlock, it’s no less legitimate an interpretation.

There’s a touch of plywood to Jude Law’s performance, but Downey really shows what a first class actor he is, arguably the single best leading man in contemporary English-speaking cinema. His rakish charisma is reason alone to make this film worth watching, and he’s superb at physical comedy. His facial acting is first class, and it’s very noticeable that he spends the whole film speaking in an accent not his own (flawlessly, I might add, and I’m British) without forgetting to act as well, something which is all too common. His Holmes is as suited to the big screen as Benedict Cumberbatch’s is to television.

Mr Madonna is also a dab hand behind the camera, giving us enough adrenalin-fuelled action sequences to be worthy of a Michael Bay film, although the style is noticeably the same as Lock, Stock and Snatch, despite the period setting. Victorian London looks great, though, if a bit CGI-ey. Except… there’s a certain lack of substance to the storyline, although there’s certainly enough bangs and excitement to carry us through. This Watson, far from being a bumbler, is full of back-chat; I like that. But the characterisation of Holmes suffers from a slight problem. Actually it makes a lot of sense for him to be an action hero, but the deductive skills fall flat, often relying more on obscure chemistry factoids than the sort of deductive leaps that you really expect.

The plot is a rather odd mish-mash of tropes and explosions, taking us from an attempted virgin sacrifice by cowled figures (a nice familiar trope, that!) to alchemy and a vast conspiracy theories involving thinly veiled Freemasons which seem to come straight out of Alan Moore’s From Hell (if you haven’t already done so, read it!). Lord Blackwood seems to be based on the real life Francis Dashwood, leader of the Hellfire Club during the Eighteenth Century. His plan, bizarrely, involves conquering the United States, one of Britain’s main trading partners at the time, which would be a particularly stupid thing to do as it would entirely bugger up the British economy, and the whole point of the British Empire was to make money. Sorry, my bad: I probably shouldn’t be looking too hard at the plot.

Oh, and the scene where Dashwood is hanged is quite visceral and shocking. I don’t object to the violence per se, but people were still being barbarically killed like this well within living memory, and may presumably have living relatives.

There’s a fair bit of what we Doctor Who fans call fanwank here. The inclusion of Irene Adler (the rather good Rachel McAdams) is surprisingly justified here, though, establishing the non-asexuality of Downey’s Holmes, and I suppose Moriarty is in the film to do a bit of sequel-hunting. It tends to work out. If I might nitpick, though, Tower Bridge is still under construction, which would place this film in 1892. This is rather at odds with the Conan Doyle canon, as Holmes is supposed to have fallen down the Reichenbach Falls in 1891 and disappeared for three years. Not, of course, that this kind of obscure wankery is any excuse not to use a good idea for a set-piece.

So this is a rather good action film, although nothing special, but it’s worth watching for Downey’s performance alone.