"He's compensating for something", that's what Shrek said when he saw the tall and impenetrable castle of Lord Farquaad for the first time. Well, in a way, the same could be said about Doctor Strange. This film has so many talented and trending actors involved that it could either be absolutely great or... or all that talent and gravitas were simply a distraction from something profoundly failing. Cloud Atlas was an example of the former. This film, alas, is one of the latter.

Doctor Strange goes off the hinges from the very beginning, when you see people as serious and dramatic as Mads Mikkelsen and Tilda Swinton go full Last Airbender and start waving hands as if they had a seizure. You might be hoping that it's just an awkward intro and another acclaimed batch made of Benedict Cumberbatch, Chiwetel Ejiofor and Rachel McAdams would do better. Alas, that talent also gets wasted on waving hands and saying pompous nonsense. Well, except for McAdams, who basically remains her typical cute/sensitive/soothing self, thus giving this film one of its scarce redeeming points.

However, it's not the characters that cause Doctor Strange to fail. Separately, they are rather amusing, and the talent and charisma the actors still possess bring in a handful of small ironic or witty or indeed dramatic and touching episodes which we could actually enjoy.

But when the main story kicks in, it all goes sideways. Because the world of Doctor Strange is not just lacking a strong guideline. It's also ridiculously rehashed, looking like a product of a perverse carnal love of Harry Potter and The Matrix that took place inside Christopher Nolan's mind while he was trying to go deeper by taking another LSD pill and reaching into that fractal trip. It might even sound cool, like who doesn't love HP or The Matrix or Inception. But, albeit intricate and appealing by themselves, together those concepts are as compatible as a fish, a dog and a bird: pulling each in its own direction and ultimately letting the combo go stale. Towards the finale the film gets so dull and generic that you would have to force yourself to keep attention to what's going on.

It's obvious that, after several decades of comic books and almost 20 years of screen adaptations, Marvel is in crisis of coming up with new interesting characters to build new stories around, while the old characters gradually wear off. The last Iron Man was a mess, the last Thor was a dark dullfest, and a fresh addition of Ant-man resulted in a complete travesty. The only hero that still pulls his (and his colleagues') weight is Captain America, which is even more surprising considering that he's far from the most popular superhero Marvel owns. The studio still manages to mix its toys in rather interesting ways, making them fight either alongside or against each other. So my only hope for Doctor Strange is that his addition wouldn't ruin that already overcrowded mob scene. Because in Marvel's world there are way too many marvels already.