Bigger is not always better, and neither it seems is smaller. The MCU’s smallest hero, Ant-Man, has quickly become a fan favorite thanks to the scale of his adventures. Neither the first film nor its sequel “Ant-Man and the Wasp” are dealing with the kind of global or galactic threats that Captain America or Thor might be dealing with, and therefore can be a nice reprieve from the heavier side of this cinematic universe.
But all that gets thrown out the window for this third adventure which finds Ant-Man/Scott Lang, played by Paul Rudd (“Clueless,” “I Love You, Man”), The Wasp/Hope van Dyne, played by Evangeline Lily (“Lost,” “The Hurt Locker”), Cassie Lang, played by Kathryn Newton (“Blockers,” “Freaky”), Hank Pym, played by Michael Douglas (“Wall Street,” “The Game”), and Janet van Dyne, played by Michelle Pfeiffer (“Batman Returns,” “Dangerous Minds”), shrunk down and trapped in the Quantum Realm. While trying to find a way to escape, they end up drawing the wrath of Kang the Conqueror, played by Jonathan Majors (“Devotion,” “The Harder They Fall”) and M.O.D.O.K., played by Corey Stoll (“House of Cards (2013),” “First Man”).
You could charitably say that the MCU is in a bit of a rough spot right now. Certainly, there are some bright spots, with the likes of “Wakanda Forever,” “WandaVision,” and “The Falcon and the Winter Soldier.” But it feels like every new project has some kind of caveat to it; some feeling of “it’s good if you ignore this,” or “its fine after it finally gets going.” And while a flawed film can still be enjoyed, “Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania” is something else entirely.
Returning director Peyton Reed (“Bring It On,” “Down with Love”), and first-time screenwriter Jeff Loveness (“Rick and Morty”) frankly do not have the skill to handle an adventure of this size. More than that though, it feels as though they’ve both fundamentally misunderstood the appeal of Ant-Man, not only in the MCU but in the larger scope of superhero films. The everyman charm Rudd is so good at exuding is tamped down here, forcing him to be the straight man in a much more serious story. Rudd is doing his best, but the material simply doesn’t give him much to work with, trapping him in a world of confusing dimensional lingo and sapping his natural charisma.
The rest of the cast doesn’t fare much better. Lily, Douglas, and Pfeiffer are all going through the motions, trying to get through this contractually obligated sci-fi adventure, looking bewildered at most of it and acting much the same. Newton fairs a bit better, mostly just because of her chemistry with Rudd. Majors is the only one really pulling any of their weight, and he proves to be a menacing and memorable villain, building on the threads teased during his first appearance in “Loki.”
Loveness’s script simply makes it hard to care about anything that’s happening. It’s so layered in dimensional mumbo-jumbo that it starts to feel like obligatory weirdness just for the sake of it. The Quantum Realm doesn’t feel like a natural place, simply one that exists as a series of segmented locations that all just exist near each other. There’s no flow to the logic of it all either, instead filling out the background with purple and orange geography and CGI creatures and humans seemingly at random.
The tone of it all doesn’t work either. It feels like this script was written simply so any hero could be slapped into it and still work. Nothing here feels tied to the characters, with everything simply happening around them or to them. Lang doesn’t feel like he has any say over what’s happening, just that he’s dragged from place to place so he can be where the story is. There are some scenes that really nail the appeal of Lang, including a major one that plays with Rudd’s charisma in an interesting and visually fun way, and the ending also seems to be going in a really interesting direction, until it just doesn’t. There is something to the idea of an average Joe like Scott having to go through an adventure so far out of his league like this, and that basic idea could make for a great film. Rudd absolutely makes the film as good as it possibly could be by nailing that kind of dynamic. It’s just a shame that dynamic ends up being a byproduct of the character being here rather than anything intentionally written or explored.
Visually, this is without a doubt the worst a Marvel film has looked in quite some time. The goopy nature of everything manages to look bad on two crucial fronts: its unconvincing and just ugly. Characters float in front of the backgrounds and while there isn’t any green screen haze around them, the lack of anything real in most scenes means there isn’t anything to ground the actors or the viewers eyes. Sure, there have been complaints in the past that modern blockbusters have turned into entirely green-screened affairs, but this one actually might just come the closest.
But even if the effects looked realistic and like the actors were actually there, it all still looks ugly. The dark orange and purple mixtures of the Quantum Realm just do not look pleasing in any way, and the buildings and background characters look like leftovers from other sci-fi Marvel projects, as if they just scrapped together the rejects from “Guardians of the Galaxy” or “Thor Ragnarok” and called it a day. It’s just a profoundly ugly film that doesn’t even manage to look convincing while looking bad.
Somehow, Marvel has managed to deliver one of its worst films in arguably a decade. “Quantumania” is maniac all right, as it’s an ugly film that fails to understand the basic appeals of its central character and why people would show up for a film with “Ant-Man” in the title. But more than that, its script is painfully rote, with tonal misfires at every turn that turn a bland and boring adventure into a frustrating one. This was advertised as “the beginning of a new dynasty,” telling audiences that this would be an essential piece of viewing for the future of the MCU, specifically due to Kang. Hell, the next Avengers film is called “The Kang Dynasty” so that shows how much stake Marvel is putting into this film as a full introduction to the villain.
Yet, while Kang is undoubtedly the best part of the film, nearly everything else suffers around him. It feels as though for everything that ends up subpar, there’s an easy way to see how it could’ve been better, how things could have been tweaked or toned down to become a more coherent, better constructed film. Sure, you can easily turn off your brain and get a passing level of enjoyment for this third adventure with Scott Lang and his friends. But is “turning off your brain” really the best result for a film that costs $200 million? 2/5
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