Marvel movies have been disappointing since Infinity War, but as a fan of Sam Raimi's early work, from Evil Dead to Darkman, A Simple Plan and of course his Spiderman trilogy, I dared to have high hopes for this film.

And indeed, the direction stands out as possibly the best of any Marvel movie to date. It's night and day compared to boring, flatly shot by the numbers filmmaking like the new Spiderman trilogy. Raimi is able to perfectly balance levity, action, character moments and even suspense and a bit of his trademark horror.

However, even Kubrick level direction couldn't have fixed this absolute mess of a script.

The plot has characters behaving completely out of character, forces character to act stupidly for the next plot point to happen and worst of all, is almost completely reliant on prior knowledge of the Wandavision TV show. Not having seen that, Scarlet Witch's motivation is entirely illogical, not to mention her turn from hero to genocidal maniac is completely out of character who someone who helped save the universe from Thanos.

The MCU has turned into a giant, unfocused mess, where nostalgia, cross-promotion, marketing or woke identity politics nonsense take precedence over narrative coherence. While unlike the most recent plot driven Marvel movies Dr. Strange 2 is actually mostly charcter driven, it suffers from the same flaw as all recent Marvel films: character driven dialogue scenes are almost always cut short by someone yelling "enough talking", before the movie grinds to a halt for a nauseating 15 minute scene of cartoon physics and adobe after effects plugin energy beams.

The central conflict of this film may have been the worst case yet. The entire reason for the confrontation with thousands killed could have been avoided with one simple sentence "No Wanda, you kill the girl to take her power, but we will find a universe in which you children are orphaned, and take you there." Or maybe even add a twist that in one of these universes Wanda is evil and must be stopped. Or start the movie with Wanda heading to a universe in which she foresees the Wanda of that universe will be killed, and initially try to rescue her, only for Wanda herself to be revealed as the killer from the vision.

There could have been hundreds of ways to give her a better motivation that was not relaint on friends being unable to talk sense into each other.

That really is the core problem with these Marvel movies. Supposedly intelligent characters are unable to communicate simple ideas to each other and end up fighting. The same happens with Strange and the Illuminati.

The writers sacrifice character and narrative for spectacle, and it's a darm shame, because comic book movies have shown that they can be intelligent, character driven stories that still entertain. But even the spectacle is underwehlming. Maybe I've been spoiled by the recent Batman or Dune movies, but the Marvel movies feel increadibly cheap. From digital chromatic abberation to directional blur and various energy blast and particle flow plugins, effects in MCU films often look like envato presets. Even the matting looks bad, like on the rooftop scene after the opening. The actors were clearly on a soundstage that was badly matted onto a digital backdrop of NY. If a production can't even be bothered to arrange for a drone shot of the actors on a roof in NY, you know there's something wrong.

The acting is generally underwhelming here, except for Elizabeth Olsen steals every scene she is in. Imagine what she could do with a good script.

Aside from her, the other standout performance is by... Bruce Campbell. Because of course it is. It's one of several little Evil Dead easter eggs. I really wish someone would give this guy some leading roles, because he just lights up the screen.