Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania is, at its best, a travelogue of a failed family vacation. Early into the picture, Cassie Lang (Kathryn Newton) inadvertently drags her loved ones – parents Scott Lang and Hope Van Dyne (Paul Rudd and Evangeline Lilly, our title duo), and maternal grandparents Hank Pym and Janet Van Dyne (Michael Douglas and Michelle Pfeiffer, returning as the original Ant-Man and Wasp) – on an unexpected, subatomic getaway to the Ninth Rung of Disney Hell. The official name of their destination is the Quantum Realm, the nadir of popcorn filmgoing. This is where our eyeballs and brains, as audience-members, pay penance for the MCU’s ongoing embrace of dark and muddy CGI and VFX.
In Quantumania, young Cassie realizes her grandmother’s worst nightmare: reentering an infinitesimal and dangerous world, far beyond human experience, where existence hangs in the balance. In the theater, we realize Martin Scorsese’s worst nightmare: reentering the treadmill of tired, franchise filmmaking, a substitute for episodic television, where boffo box-office receipts beget sequel upon sequel upon sequel, almost biblically.
The third Ant-Man movie, again helmed by director Peyton Reed, only offers more ammunition for Scorsese, and the MCU haters of the world. I, by no means, am a Marvel skeptic. Even the second entry in this particular series once stood apart from the pack – genuinely comedic, light as air. Quantumania, on the other hand, grinds its gears against future Phase Five installments, another MCU cog that can’t spin independently. Though it has moments of levity, most of its (blessedly short-ish) runtime merely sets up upcoming Avengers extravaganzas. Two are forthcoming. They’ll be Earth-shattering, no doubt.
What is Quantumania about? Well, I was told no spoilers could be revealed until later this month. But intrepid fans have probably figured out that the announcement of Jonathan Majors as Kang the Conqueror, two-plus years ago, as the villain of this movie, means the third Ant-Man episode is merely an origin story for our new Thanos. He, by the way, is electric, even if Kang’s motives seem generic, even for a comic book antagonist.
A lot of world-saving heroics happen in the Quantum Realm by our vastly outmatched family. Yet the action set-pieces here are mostly confounding in execution, if not outright mind-numbing. All of Quantumania is a set-up for the next thing. The Big Bad arrives and, after a political uprising occurs, he’s briefly thwarted. Kang probably survives another day, to create future havoc. This, mind you, isn’t a spoiler. At last year’s San Diego Comic-Con, the title of an upcoming Avengers movie was announced: The Kang Dynasty. Could our next great supervillain, maybe, be Kang the Conqueror? Uh, yeah. No shit, Sherlock.
Marvel Studios eagerly spoiled itself and, in turn, made this movie pointless. What the studio didn’t anticipate were three fabulous and thrilling Oscar nominees for Best Picture – Everything Everywhere All at Once, Top Gun: Maverick and Avatar: The Way of Water – which, by comparison, instantly make the spectacularly ugly and deeply irrelevant Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania seem like a bargain-basement blockbuster.
Photo courtesy of Walt Disney Pictures
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