Doctor Strange: The Sorcerer Supreme

This was a nice little rebound for the straight-to-video line. Not great, but decent, and quite a bit better than the last one. Doctor Strange is one of the lesser known Marvel heroes, but if you've seen Doctor Orpheus on The Venture Bros., you have an idea of what he's like. This is another origin story film, but since it was one I wasn't really familiar with, I didn't mind it so much. It's a pretty brief, quick film, without a ton of extraneous content beyond the central plot. Stephen Strange is a surgeon who loses the finer use of his hands, goes bankrupt trying to find someone who can fix him, and then gets adopted by a strange order of sorcerers who chill out in Tibet and train him to use magic. A lot of the story is pretty heavy on recognizable tropes, like the wizened old master and the headstrong guy who feels shunned, and the bad guys weren't developed enough for the final act to really resonate that much. It's really a pretty simple film. But it's inoffensive and mildly interesting and has some decent action. There's a lot of the sorcerers waving their hands around as brightly colored stuff flies out of their hands and does stuff to monsters, but it's fairly well animated and well paced and hits the right notes for this sort of thing. There's really not much else to say about the movie. It's moderately successful at a very modest goal. Pretty much the definition of a middle-of-the-road super hero story.