Marvel, to its credit, has frequently hired filmmakers with distinctive styles, or at least ones who have made interesting movies. The question of authorship - of how much creative control a director can exercise at the helm of one of these films - has loomed over the MCU for years. Sometimes, it’s almost possible to pretend that we’ve been launched, like the racing demon entity of the Evil Dead films, back into the director’s original neck of the woods. The zombie’s weapon of choice? Swarms of shrieking apparitions. There’s a book of dark spells and a haunted house and the possessed cadaver of a dead superhero. The camera whips and zooms with characteristic zeal, at one point shifting to the first-person (first-monster?) POV of a one-eyed, multi-tentacled kaiju. This isn’t the only identifying mark Raimi leaves on Multiverse, his first movie in nine years and his first superhero blockbuster since 2007’s trilogy-capping Spider-Man 3. It’s the Master of the Mystic Arts who subjects him to this (self-) abuse, answering Campbell’s bit-player belligerence with the magical equivalent of “stop hitting yourself.” But the real man responsible is the one behind the camera: the Evil Dead maestro himself, Sam Raimi, marking his return to filmmaking by briefly putting the one-time Ash Williams through another wringer of slapstick torment. That would be the scene where Bruce Campbell, cult horror’s most gifted physical comedian, wanders in to play an obnoxious civilian who winds up fending off attacks from his own hand. Of all the surprise crowd-pleasing cameos packed into Marvel’s Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness, only one will provoke a nostalgic, involuntary “groovy” from certain members of the audience.
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