The Bad Guy Can't Read Until The Good Guy Learns Magic

Rating: 6/10 (6 November 2016)

This is more like a 6.5 but I just can't give it a 7 because of this glaring plot hole. I don't consider it a spoiler because it's the first scene in the film that just sort of happens and isn't explained.
So the movie opens with a bad guy stealing pages from an ancient book. Okay, fair enough. But then we learn that these are pages that he is incapable of translating because the first half of the movie has yet to happen. See, there aren't any scenes suggesting he can't read them, we're just told that he can't. So we have this bad guy and he doesn't really show up again until close to half way threw the film. This is one scene where he does something in a church but it's not clear what he's doing. It's just a throw away scene to remind the audience there is a bad guy in the movie.
So we're lead to believe that one of the former masters of this school is unable to read or preform the spell written on the pages and it's never explained why. Meanwhile Doctor Strange has to do his thing. He gets in a car accident, looses all hope after numerous surgeries to save his crippled hands. He then turned to eastern medicine, learned about other dimensions, and after living there for a time he finally become a skilled sorcerer. And it's only now that the bad guy gets to do anything to progress the story.
How Much Time Passed? In the comic books Steven Strange spends something 3 years studying the mystic arts. In the film he maybe spends a month or two. We know this because he grows a beard and shaves once (which gets us the iconic hair style so that's good). Also he reads fairly thick books, 4 at a time, multiple times in the film. Though we're told he has a photographic memory so that makes the books hard to judge. Later though he finds the book with the pages torn out of it, (The bad guy was nice enough not steal the whole thing,) I won't say what he does with the book because that would be spoilers, but he's able to read the book which is written in a cryptic language. So he's had time to learn this language.
Again why can't the bad guy read the pages? What is he doing in this time? It's suggested earlier that anyone at this place is allowed to read the forbidden books. Also they have a wifi password. Couldn't he have just taken a picture of the pages with his phone if he has one? None of this makes any sense, and the bad guy isn't in the film enough to answer any of these questions.
Basically the first half of this film needed a rewrite. The stealing of the pages scene should have come later on in the story and been replaced with him being cast out and starting his own cult of followers or something.
The acid trip, "Inception" inspired fight scenes with cities twisting inside out and folding over themselves made more sense. These scenes are the highlight of the film where they clearly focused their efforts.
Overall It's not a bad film. It's well acted, the sets were amazing, there is a sound track that's completely forgettable but not bad.