Reviews, even some of the mixed/negative-skewing ones, are actually helping me increase my excitement here a bit. Seems like there really is a lot of Raimi slathered all over this thing.
These bits from
this review have me especially optimistic (no actual spoilers here, but tagging anyways just to be safe since I know some people don't like to read reviews at all which is totally fair):
Spoiler
But the fact remains that Raimi is a natural-born scrapper who's always thrived on limitations. Many of his films (e.g. "The Evil Dead" and "A Simple Plan") have tapped into a pure darkness underlying the seductive promise of infinite possibility, while others (take a wild guess) have displayed a deep conviction that power demands responsibility. He is, for those same reasons, the ideal person to offer Marvel the gentle gut-check it's needed for so long, the ideal person to tell a story about what happens after you open Pandora's box, and to do so in a way that allows the MCU and its fans to find a measure of peace in the idea that they have to move forward — no matter how much it hurts.
That's not enough to make "Multiverse of Madness" a great movie, but it is enough to make it a real Sam Raimi movie. Slowly, gradually, and then with great enthusiasm, what begins as a staid tale of people hurling CGI at larger pieces of CGI while yammering on about whatever new thing is threatening all existence evolves into something less familiar: A violent, wacky, drag-me-to-several-different-hells at once funhouse of a film that makes good on the reckoning Chiwetel Ejiofor promised at the end of the original by cutting away the safety net that previous installments of the MCU have tried to pretend wasn't there.
In the shadow of the programmatic corporate ****-fest/apologia that was last year's "Spider-Man: No Way Home," the giddy second half of Raimi's carnivalesque sequel almost hits with the same undead thrill of watching "Evil Dead II" for the first time (the difference between Jon Watts and Sam Raimi is the difference between Bob Ross and Roy Lichtenstein). With all due respect to Kenneth Branagh's dutch angles in "Thor" and Chloé Zhao's well-documented insistence on lighting certain shots of "Eternals" with the same exact sun people use on the set of real movies like "Nomadland," this is the first MCU movie in which many of the shots have legible fingerprints on them.
Even the film's galaxy brain attempts at fan service, which include a few well-kept secrets this review wouldn't dare to reveal, are eventually perverted to the point that hardcore Marvel heads and hate-watchers alike might find themselves cheering at the same volume (the result of a tongue-in-cheek approach that's far more effective here, in the guise of a typical MCU movie, than it is in a juvenile satire like "Deadpool").
[...]
But that hardly matters by the time things begin to slide off the rails and Raimi starts transforming this super-sized episode of "What If?" into a carnival of souls complete with legitimate (if gentle) jump-scares, a wild take on the house of mirrors, flourishes of unsettling body horror, Benedict Wong kicking all sorts of ass, and a camera that is ready to be attached to anything at any time so long as it's moving really fast.
