I’ve already given up on the MCU and I wouldn’t even be watching this if it weren’t because it was directed by Sam Raimi. I was curious about this being an MCU horror movie and I still have enough affection for Raimi’s early work to see what he could do. As it turns out, this is an extremely Raimi film and you can recognize the director’s characteristic style from his earliest days everywhere in this. The bad news is that this is not at all a good thing as he can’t seem to resist indulging in his old bag of tricks even when it’s wildly inappropriate. The result is visually entertaining but also tonally inconsistent and emotionally dead. It’s not among the worst of the MCU films but it’s not great either.

America Chavez, a teenager with the power to cross universes, arrives in the primary MCU dimension and is chased by a demon. After attending the wedding of his former colleague Christine Palmer, Dr. Strange witnesses the disturbance and intervenes to save her together with Wong. Realizing that the demon was a product of witchcraft, Strange approaches Wanda Maximoff for help. He learns however that Wanda has been corrupted by the Darkhold and has been the source of the attacks against America Chavez all along. As she has no children in this dimension, she seeks to steal her twin sons from another version of herself. To do so, she needs America’s power and wants to steal it from her. Strange and Wong ensconce Chavez at Kamar-Taj and call in all of their students to turn it into a fortress. However with her powers enhanced by the Darkhold, Wanda is unstoppable and she kills many of the sorcerers. Chavez uses her to power to escape, transporting herself and Strange to a dimension where the local version of Strange is already dead and the world is run by a coterie of heroes who call themselves the Illuminati.

The film is conventional and alright for a while. Wanda’s face-heel turn is a natural outgrowth of the WandaVision series I rather liked. The character of America Chavez literally appears out of nowhere and has poorly defined powers. That’s annoying but I can give her a pass. I liked the siege of Kamar-Taj as a large-scale action scene against a single powerful enemy. But when they start crossing dimensions, things just get silly and over-the-top. The inclusion of the Illuminati feels like fan service with no depth. We get to see the characters and can imagine the turns that their lives took to put them in this situation, which is fun. But it’s all so shallow as Wanda deals them almost effortlessly. They don’t even feel like real characters as they don’t emotionally react to their colleagues being killed. Any emotional impact the film has is further diluted as Wanda, Strange and Chavez all have separate internal conflicts to resolve. Wanda’s arc is by far the most compelling while Strange’s arc about every version of him being in love with Christine is just trite and stupid. It’s the usual problem of too many characters competing for limited time and attention.

What’s more surprising is how Raimi seems to sabotage himself. The scene where Wanda chases Strange and Chavez is a classic of the horror genre: the slower and yet unstoppable monster advancing inexorably. Yet it looks ridiculous in the context of all of them being so powerful. Why is Wanda limping along when she can fly around? Why does Strange expect a metal barrier to stop her when she can crack open an entire magical fortress? There’s no tension here given what we know of what the characters can do. It’s just Raimi falling back on old tropes without adapting them to a different context. I did enjoy elements like animating the dead and the demonic version of Strange. Fans of his Evil Dead trilogy will find the imagery familiar and that fits decently in this film. Even so the tone is more playful than horrific. The other characters don’t seem to care very much about Strange dipping into the dark side and it all feels rather silly.

All in all, this isn’t a terrible superhero film and it does at least offer a satisfactory resolution to Wanda as the antagonist. But it’s also painful to see Raimi being so stuck in his old ways and so unable to come up with new imagery. The result is mediocre at best. At the same time it’s clear that Marvel no longer cares about continuity or even any sort of verisimilitude in the power levels of its characters. Consequently, I feel even less reason to care about every new MCU release.