I'm not a comic book fan (I did see it with one who was also disappointed though), however I do generally like the Marvel comic movies. To me, the films should be able to stand on their own though because if they are relying solely on the people who have read the Dr Strange comics they will have lost the vast majority of their audience.

Now for the review... This movie makes suicide squad look like art. The FX are overdone, the director hasn't really known how to express certain concepts and so has just resorted to quite cheap looking whizzing lights. The acting is okay but Cumberbatch is characteristically wooden and his character is unlikable (not his fault the character is supposed to be unlikeable). The female master (whose name escapes me for the minute) is too one dimensional to care about, the result being that there was no-one to root for. I barely remember the bad guys, they were way too (and I hate to use the phrase again) one dimensional and too many of them to focus your dislike on any of them. The plot also gets a bit iffy toward the end but I don't want to spoil it. ;) I know this is supposed to be on the periphery of the Marvel universe but it feels so detached from the rest of it you might as well consider it to be a different universe again. It's kind of like they have said 'and to hell with explaining the pseudo science with these characters, these ones are just magic, OK?'. And that may seem like a small thing but it isn't. It means that you can't ponder whether one superhero could defeat another because there is no logic to it that holds true throughout. It's just magic so anything could happen and all of it is on such a different level to what the rest of the superheroes are doing (fighting crime not alternate beings from other dimensions) that Dr Strange should effectively render them all redundant. I went because I got two free off-peak tickets of my choosing with a promotion on four packs of m&m's and I overpaid.