Marvel has rarely been terribly grounded as a media franchise. For a long time now it has primarily been concerned with its grandiose world or universe-threatening affairs and the stories of heroes and their relationships to other heroes. That’s why the Ant-Man movies have been kind of refreshing. Compared to the big guns of Iron Man, Captain America or Thor, they’ve been low, personal-stakes action-comedies centred on the only Avenger who could reasonably pass for an ordinary guy: a San Francisco working class ex-con whose humble life goals and relationships, including with his ex-wife and daughter, are as important as his superhero-ing. Directed by Peyton Reed, both Ant-Man and Ant-Man and the Wasp, though not necessarily the cream of Marvel’s crop, have been fun and charming movies for this -among the few MCU movies I’ve had the desire to go back and revisit.
Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania throws all of that out. And though Reed is once again at the helm, he seemingly has no control over matters of tone, aesthetic, or even action and character. It feels nothing like the other Ant-Man movies, instead it is something more inert, more micromanaged, more desperate to assert its importance for the future of this next phase in the MCU. In many ways it is just as drastic a shift as Thor: Ragnarok was for its respective series -except in the opposite direction of quality.
The movie starts off in a semblance of that light tone that characterized its predecessors. But the conspicuous absence of all of Scott Lang’s non-superhero connections is the first and perhaps biggest red flag. No Michael Peña and his “La Cucaracha”-honking van, no Judy Greer and Bobby Cannavale as Scott’s concerned though friendly ex-family -even Randall Park’s good-natured parole officer is limited to a brief shot in a montage sequence. And sadly this seems to be reflected in a subtle change to Scott’s character, where he has cashed in on his Avengers fame with a book deal and apparent ego boost, and adopted as his primary social circle (as well as that for his daughter Cassie) the Pym family of fellow shrinking superheroes.
This reality is only momentarily established, along with a shallow layer of new identity for Cassie that pays disingenuous lip service to police brutality towards activists, before sucking its central cast down into the quantum realm, a CGI-rendered subatomic universe that the rest of the movie’s plot plays out in. Setting aside the awkward pacing and story structure that will continue to plague the movie, the Quantum Realm as established in the previous Ant-Man movie, is not actually that interesting a concept or environment -much as there is creativity poured into it here. Essentially it is just another version of the Marvel cosmic universe seen in the Guardians of the Galaxy and Thor movies, somewhat interesting-looking (though its aesthetic, similar to Disney’s Strange World, is likewise ultimately insubstantial), but without any real character. Both in scope and in style it’s reminiscent of the imaginative worlds of the Star Wars prequels, but as in the Star Wars prequels it is ultimately hollow. The dictatorial regime is a bit rote and the denizens’ personalities remain fixed to that hollow brand quippiness. They got William Jackson Harper and even Bill Murray to some extent doing it, neither of whom is particularly invested in where they are.
That seems to be shared with the main cast. Paul Rudd to his credit is giving a solid effort, although the film severely limits or else mishandles his core strength as a performer -his comedic delivery- in favour of a generally more serious take on the character that tries to define him as a formidable hero directly going up against the MCU’s new Thanos. Even in this capacity however he fares a lot better than Evangeline Lilly (who is a titular character) and Michael Douglas sleepwalking through the film and its intangible elements. Michelle Pfeiffer is gifted a larger part and a backstory that mostly functions as MCU set-up with little personal interest attached, while Kathryn Newton, newly cast as Cassie Lang -who of course is now a junior Ant-Man herself, struggles to find a distinct angle to this generic spunky teenager of Scott’s. She is perhaps the clearest, though not by any means only victim of a shabby, disorganized script.
And it’s clear the movie as a whole is not really about Ant-Man and his family -the distinction of their powers is virtually moot in this environment where shrinking in size means nothing (there’s no relatable context for it to be even slightly creative). No, the point of the movie from the vantage of the larger universe is just to formally establish the next big villain: Kang the Conqueror, played by Jonathan Majors. Majors made his debut at the end of the Loki series on Disney+, though thankfully this movie isn’t wholly linked to that in its use of the character. The fact that Kang is really a collection of multiverse duplicates allows Majors to play incarnations differently which is good, because while in Loki he was fairly charming and imposing, here the performance is a lot more wild with contradictions. He’ll go from cool and controlling to campy and operatic within the span of a scene -Majors makes some unusual choices with his line-readings. He’s at least different from several Marvel villain predecessors, but it remains to be seen whether he can sustain a performance consistent enough to be properly menacing. All through the climax he’s just kinda petulant.
It is worthy though of the movie’s tone, which struggles to find a bridge between the goofy and the serious, making efforts to couch elements of one within the other. Like when Scott is being literally drowned by infinite self-creating duplicates -one of whom is a callback to the Baskin Robbins gag from previous movies, and only manages to pull through via determination to save his daughter. Or how one character turns an act of violence committed against them into a payoff on a lame joke. And as an aside, most of the films’ efforts at humour fall flat -this script substitutes Community’s Chris McKenna and Erik Sommers for Rick and Morty’s Jeff Loveness. Probably the single greatest example of the failed efforts to blend tones is in the character of MODOK, whose actor I can’t reveal for spoiler-y reasons. MODOK, a Marvel comics character popular through irony for being just a giant floating head with tiny arms and legs, is one of the movie’s most awkward and ill-placed additions. But of course a live-action MODOK is terrifying, rendered here as a giant ugly stretched out human face that no efforts at mildly self-conscious humour can distract from. And this combination of hideous VFX with an overwrought comic attitude and an attempt at pathos that the script can never decide how much to commit to makes for a bewildering aspect to the movie, perfectly representative of its larger problems.
The last act is a complete mess, beginning with a badly integrated plot point involving ants that betrays how often the film forgets who its lead character is. A theme on revolution is sidelined by preferred focus on the heroes and a series of reversals as to the big fight with Kang, including a final cheap one that neuters a potentially interesting endpoint. And it is here where what little believability in the environment as drawn is completely subsumed by CGI miasma –nothing but the actor’s faces have any degree of depth to them.
Quantumania was approached creatively as a stepping stone rather than a continuation of the series it ostensibly belongs to -the cast could pretty closely be swapped out for that of any other MCU series and the movie wouldn’t be tangibly different. All that matters is establishing Kang as the new overarching antagonist for the next few years, giving hints at what devastation he’ll bring, and raising the stakes for the MCU broadly. Marvel has done this dance several times before, but not since Infinity War has an individual story been so dwarfed by set-up, even as this story is at least allowed to wrap up in a relatively self-contained way. But it’s also missing the fun that characterized the other Ant-Man movies, the sense of humility that goes along with a hero whose main powers are to shrink in size and command ants. It’s a dull, tedious and over-complicated affair –and only promises more of that for Marvel’s immediate future.
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