Usually I come home from a new Marvel movie excited to write a review. But I got out of Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness, the follow-up to 2016’s perfectly fine Doctor Strange, only to open my phone and see that the Supreme Court is poised to overturn Roe v. Wade. It’s hard to care about a superhero movie with what feels like America unraveling at the seams. But I’ll give it a shot.

Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness is a movie. It is a movie directed by the legendary Sam Raimi, who was here a long time ago with Spider-Man(s), and it was written by Loki’s Michael Waldron. It is a movie that was dogged by COVID-induced production delays and mired for a long time in development hell and the exit of original Doctor Strange director Scott Derrickson for “creative differences” and it is a movie that went through several script overhauls. Unfortunately, it is a movie that shows the strains of the many cooks in the kitchen of its making. It is at its best when it is a Sam Raimi movie—when it cuts loose and has some wacky, scary, trippy weird fun.