Exactly What You'd Expect - Unfortunately

Rating: 7/10 (5 March 2017)

Doctor Strange is THE quintessentially generic Marvel comic-book film. It executes the established formula with mechanical precision. The origin. The early training. The villain. The gratuitous quips. The evolution of The Costume. The Earth-shattering finale. It's all there.
This makes for a fun film, but not a great one. What Doctor Strange really lacks is *strangeness.* The truly original vision that Steve Ditko brought to comics in the 1960s (and which numerous other creators have built on, over the years). The early plots were hokey, maybe, but they were original. The look and feel and concept of the comics was unusual, bizarre, like nothing that had gone before. It was that unique sense of style that set Doctor Strange comics apart.
Doctor Strange, the film, is devoid of any style of its own. As the trailers correctly intimated, the visuals are largely swiped from Inception, and do absolutely nothing to capture the Ditko world of demented alternate dimensions. The look of the film is glossy and modern, where it should be bizarre and scary.
The often-annoying Cumberbatch is actually not bad as Stephen Strange - but he's also not particularly good. He's really the same guy as Robert Downey's Tony Stark. Both of whom could easily be older Peter Parkers. He's yet another Generic Action Guy, laughing nervously in the face of cosmic dangers. Even though Doctor Strange was the one Marvel hero who was truly devoid of humor. His was a grim world of sorcery, not of levity, but of endless study and utter devotion to forbidden arts. There's none of that in this film.
Doctor Strange is certainly worth seeing as two hours of light diversion. It's well-made and satisfying in its own terms. But coming after a decade of Marvel adaptations, it's also utterly forgettable. And a cosmic let-down to anyone who had any love for the original material. It's probably just about what Steve Ditko would have feared Hollywood would do to his work.