The cynical side of me wants to call this _Everything, everywhere all at once_ for consoomers.
The optimistic side of me sees Kevin Feige finally starting to push the boundaries of his own franchise.
I guess it’s a little bit of both in end.

Undoubtedly, the best thing about the movie is the Sam Raiminess of it all. His fingerprints are all over it; weird camera angles, camp, his sense of horror, etc.
Elizabeth Olsen and Benedict Cumberbatch are giving some of their best performances as these characters to date, and the music’s really well done.
But ultimately the film’s Achilles heel is its own script, which is complete junk. The story is thin, messy, nonsensical, and at times flat out embarrassing. The set-up in the first act is very rushed, while the second act feels like it was written by a Reddit fanpage (you just know for a fact that Marvel only went in this direction because there are 2 Batmen have been announced for _The Flash_). It’s Marvel at its most ‘producty’, and it’s going to trick a lot of people into thinking the film is better than it is. A lot of the story beats don’t make sense either, with lots of the characters arcs either feeling rushed or nonsensical, even despite the copious amounts of exposition that are trying to tie everything together. The choices made with Wanda in the third act are baffling, and I still don’t know what the takeaway is supposed to be by the end of the film. The new character (America Chavez) is a boring, underdeveloped plot device. Some of the dialogue is also shockingly cheesy. There’s a speech in the third act where I challenge anyone not to not cringe during that scene. It doesn’t help either that the pacing of this film is so fast to the point where none of the writing choices being made are allowed to breathe. I’m not sure what happened, but it feels like a significant portion of this film was reworked and rewritten during the editing.
The action didn’t impress me whatsoever, but that’s been a case with these films for a while now (some of the stuff in _Shang-Chi_ excluded). Most of the movie looks tacky and unfinished, the action’s a bunch of people shooting flashing lights at each other, shots don’t linger enough, people move like animated characters, it’s all the usual bs (and this is coming from someone who thinks the action and effects in the first one are still underappreciated to this day).Inbetween the first film and the sequel, Marvel has become a machine that’s now collapsing under its own pressure. If Disney would allow it, they really should go back to making 2-3 properties a year. The consistent mediocrity of their current output is killing their own longevity.

4/10