THIS REVIEW OF ANT-MAN AND THE WASP: QUANTUMANIA CONTAINS MINOR SPOILERS.
by Jarrod Jones. Maybe it’s unfair to put so much on the tiny shoulders of Ant-Man. Wasn’t there a time when these Paul Rudd movies were modest, between-Avengers diversions that made big things small and small things big? Rudd’s third Ant-Man film, Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania, has even bigger things on its mind; it has to knock out the genesis point for Phase The Fifth in a billion-dollar franchise and be a good Ant-Man trilogy capper, to boot. It’s nuts how busy this movie is, I swear.
While Scott Lang (Rudd) was never a character that demanded a deeper look into why he, well, makes small things big and big things small, a canny storyteller could squeeze a bit of drama out of his post-Endgame victories, right? How has Hope Van Dyne (Evangeline Lilly), for instance, coped with once being phased out of reality? Has this affected Scott and Hope’s love life in the slightest? (Do they even have a love life?) Quantumania doesn’t have time for any of that; there’s franchise restructuring to manage and a new Phase-long heavy named Kang the Conqueror (Jonathan Majors) to introduce. (The Disney+ series Loki technically did it first and didn’t, for convoluted story reasons.) All of this is as dry and clockwork as it sounds.
Marvel Studios has pivoted away from relatively grounded stuff like 2008’s Iron Man (2008!) to set its sights on box-office-busting spectacles like Endgame. Naturally, the demand for bigger (and apparently wackier) MCU entries has forced Ant-Man to adapt to the times. Quantumania has to streamline what’s come before to ensure butts hit the seats, so it brushes past potentially interesting/fun character moments and even conspicuously shoves out one of its two marquee leads to add a bit of cosmic—and comic—wiggle room. Hope, aka The Wasp, has a crazy low profile in the film; her character matters so little (puns!) that you can call Lilly’s presence here a glorified cameo. Depending on how you tweet, that either will or will not be an issue.
There’s another franchise expansion to consider, too: here comes Cassie Lang (Kathryn Newton), Scott’s teenage daughter who has missed out on years of upbringing from her jailbird/Avenger father and yet still managed to become a quantum scientist and a socially-minded great samaritan. (Are any flawed characters left in the MCU that James Gunn doesn’t write? Anyway, Cassie makes the doo-dad that pulls the Ant-Men and the Wasps into trouble.) There’s also more screentime given to the original Wasp, Janet Van Dyne (Michelle Pfeiffer), whose years spent in the film’s central locale, the Quantum Realm, is a matter of gossip and bad feelings, felt chiefly by Kang.
Janet and Kang’s relationship wrings the most drama out of Quantumania, though their antagonistic exploits are relegated to flashbacks and a dopey cameo from Bill Murray. (Marvel’s gravitational pull truly knows no limits nor shame.) While Janet’s former home had previously been established in prior Ant-movies, it lacked the iconic visual stamp from other noted Marvel locales as, um, never mind. But for its part, the Quantum Realm does end up striking a visual fusion of The Herculoids and Star Wars: Attack of the Clones, realized with a digital muck that looks like it sprung fully formed from a prompt typed into Midjourney AI. It’s a mess to look at; the Quantum Realm’s previsualized action sequences are a migraine to endure, and the squidgy cadre of improv-y creatures and resistance-warrior types who dwell there all wind up blending into what I’m sure will be at least one good screaming nightmare to come. (I’m mainly talking about you, MODOK.)
It could be the state of things over at Marvel Studios that every successive feature in their portfolio must seed frothing interest in the next. I’m no studio executive, but surely there’s an argument against establishing the next Thanos-level threat to the Marvel Cinematic Universe in a movie where he’s picking on Ant-Man? Majors works his imposing physical presence in a goofy green-purple get-up as much as he can, but what he gets up to here doesn’t inspire calls for a preemptive assemblage of Avengers. Why should it, when the diminutive Scott and his shrinky-dink family can handle his space-time scrapes? Quantumania sets Kang the Conqueror up as the pest in an otherwise forgettable family picnic.
Directed by Peyton Reed.
Written by Jeff Loveness.
Produced by Kevin Feige and Stephen Broussard.
Starring Paul Rudd, Evangeline Lilly, Jonathan Majors, Kathryn Newton, David Dastmalchian, Katy O’Brian, William Jackson Harper, Bill Murray, Michelle Pfeiffer, Corey Stoll, and Michael Douglas.
Rated PG-13 for Marvel’s maximum allotment of people saying ‘shit’ and vaguely gross stuff, I guess.
