The Doctor’s Diagnosis: C+
This is fine. I mean, honestly, it’s getting really hard to say anything new about these movies. Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania has had a soft critical reception for a Marvel movie, but I honestly don’t understand the distinction. I think that this is marginally better than the most recent Dr. Strange and Black Panther movies and far better than the most recent Thor. But that isn’t the most ringing endorsement, either. The latest Ant-Man is just the most recent entry in what has become an increasingly tiresome and formulaic franchise, but it didn’t do anything that particularly irritated me. That’s about all that I hope for at this point, so the lukewarm/negative response to the film is both perfectly understandable and slightly perplexing, as I don’t see how this movie delivers anything other than what would be completely expected from it at this point.
One of the few endearing qualities of the first two Ant-Man movies is that they had a fairly small scope, no pun intended. They didn’t feature tons of cameos or, when taken on their own, tie directly into the overarching Marvel story. They could be watched and appreciated on their own. I honestly don’t remember a damn thing about the second one and primarily remember that the first one was essentially a remake of Iron Man, but they were, despite all of their flaws, a somewhat refreshing break from the continuity of the Marvel series as a whole. Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania breaks that streak and instead adopts one of Marvel’s more irritating tendencies: it often doesn’t feel as much like a movie as it does a two-hour trailer for future movies.
The basic story is something that has been done a hundred times before, in everything from Jules Verne’s Journey to the Center of the Earth to last year’s godawful Strange World, as a family travels to a, well, strange world and has to survive among bizarre environments and threats. In this case, the world is the Quantum Realm and we find out that when Michelle Pfeiffer (whose character name I can’t remember) was stuck in the Quantum Realm (which is a plot point I don’t remember), she wasn’t the only human there. There was another traveler named Kang who, while initially presenting himself as a well-meaning friend, eventually revealed himself to be a genocidal madman. Flash forward to the present and Ant-Man’s daughter Cassie (now played by Kathryn Newton, much to the surprise of original actress, Abby Ryder Fortson, from the first two movies) has created a device to send a signal down to the Quantum Realm. This is a stupid idea, though, and the family all gets sucked down into the miniature world and has to stop Kang from escaping.
The general idea, as unoriginal as it may be, could still work. Even in Strange World, the world itself could have been interesting enough if the filmmakers weren’t such condescending assholes (seriously, fuck that movie). The same is true here, even if a number of set pieces are highly reminiscent of Star Wars (in fact, one scene is so reminiscent of the famous cantina sequence that I have to assume that it is an intentional homage). The idea of Ant-Man and his family working together to get out of this quirky place could be entertaining. And it is sometimes entertaining. Sometimes.
The primary issue here is that while Paul Rudd is still endearing as Ant-Man, his family (including the Wasp) just aren’t very interesting. Honestly, did you even notice that Cassie was recast until I mentioned it? Probably not because the character is a pile of nothing. Even A-listers like Michael Douglas and Michelle Pfeiffer can’t breathe life into these people and the result is a general numbness of disinterest whenever they are on screen. Aside from the push to make Cassie a major character (because we were all clamoring for that), the film seems genuinely disinterested in its principal characters. Ant-Man goes long stretches without much to do and I honestly forgot that the Wasp was even in the movie for most of the second act.
The title characters instead play second fiddle to the introduction of Kang, who is replacing Thanos as the major, Avengers-level threat in this era of Marvel movies. This is both a blessing and a curse. On the positive side, Jonathan Majors is excellent as Kang and the character himself is an excellent, complex villain with a fascinatingly convoluted history in the comics. Majors brings him to life perfectly as an eloquent, intimidating and calculating threat with a sense of humanity that distinguishes him from Thanos without diluting his sense of menace. On the negative side, the movie is more interested in establishing Kang than it is in being an Ant-Man movie. Consequently, the movie doesn’t feel so much like an Ant-Man movie as it does an extended prologue to the next Avengers movie. This has been an increasingly common problem for Marvel since the end of Phase 1, but the emphasis here is on setting up future movies rather than on this particular movie.
While the film mercifully doesn’t include Michael Peña’s godawful comic relief character from the first film, there is still plenty of Marvel’s formulaic humor and plot devices to go around. Why does every one of these movies have to end in a massive, army vs. army battle? The early MCU movies focused on their title characters and ended with battles between those heroes and one of their villains. Not every goddamn movie has to turn into The Two Towers and I honestly zone-out because I can only watch these same battles play out so many times. There are two scenes in this movie that I really enjoyed and both of them featured characters actually talking to each other, establishing background and motivation. I’m not sure how these moments escaped Disney’s censors, who don’t usually allow quiet moments, but they are quickly abandoned for a third act that closely resembles the third act of every Marvel movie in recent memory. What is meant to be exciting now just puts me to sleep.
This is the latest meh in a long series of mehs. I like it marginally better than most recent Marvel entries, but there just isn’t much here to get excited about. There isn’t anything here that particularly irritated me, but that’s about the highest praise that I can give it.
Image By: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ant-Man_and_the_Wasp%3A_Quantumania#/media/File:Ant-Man_and_the_Wasp_Quantumania_poster.jpg
