Doctor Strange

He isn't Sherlock. He isn't Khan from Star Trek Beyond. He isn't that rubbish siege negotiator from Four Lions. He's strange. With a capital S. But he's kinda small S strange too.

Yes, Bendyback Cumblebath has entered the Marvel fray as the franchise's biggest oddball. The original comics were a sixties take on a normal human being acquiring superpowers not through exposure to radiation or technological genius but by delving deep into the world of mysticism. Like wow, dude, that's so hippy.

But he's not a hippy. No, he's an arrogant son of a bitch who also happens to be one of the greatest surgeons on the planet. He doesn't HAVE to be American even though he is in the source material, but he is played American so we know he isn't Sherlock. Or Khan. Or that negotiator. Or because Stan Lee would have had a heart attack if they'd messed with his counter-culture baby too much for its big screen debut.

One car crash and two fucked up hands later Dr Stephen Strange is so desperate to cure himself and return to arrogantly saving people's lives in an operating theatre that he alienates his former girlfriend (a disappointingly male-gaze empty shell of a character played, presumably with little enthusiasm, by Rachel McAdams) and heads to the Orient in search of salvation.

What he finds is Tilda Swinton as an ancient guru type. Oh she's allowed to have a British accent. She's allowed to be a woman which she most certainly was not in the graphic novels. She's also awesome, both as a character and as the actor playing that character (sorry, did I break the fourth wall? Geek off, you'll be complaining about spoilers next).

Tilda teaches Bendyback how to do the warping space in on itself stuff from Inception only more magic mushroom stylee but Mads Mikkelson can also do this and he's a bad guy. He's stolen bad naughty knowledge from Tilda's special books and is going to summon up ultimate evil to eat up this universe. Luckily there are, we learn, an infinite number of universes but we're humans so we only give a shit about the one we're in and Comfybath has to save everything and everyone. With some help from the Ancient One's non-bad disciples.

Do they succeed, you wonder, if you haven't seen the film. Let's just say a sequel is in the pipeline, shall we?

Cumblepatch is suitably strange to be Strange and suitably different from Mr Downey Jr not to make the character seem too much like a riff on Iron Man (with hocus pocus instead of a big metal suit). Mikkelson is a heavyweight enough villain to ensure the self-centred Strange rises to the occasion when required. The visuals are astonishing without overshadowing the action or the plot.

Plot - it's not the best and it's not the worst in the celluloid Marvel universe. It's a prolonged setting of the stage for the weird doctor to presumably get completely fruitloop on us next time out. It works well enough. I'd watch it again. I watch most things more than once if they have Tilda Swinton in them, though. And so should you.