Mark Reviews Movies: ANT-MAN AND THE WASP: QUANTUMANIA

Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania, Marvel Studios

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Review by Mark Dujsik | February 16, 2023

There may come a time in the future of the so-called Marvel Cinematic Universe, after it might have become the Marvel All-Media Universe, when we look back on Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania as some very quaint thing in the history of this franchise. Here, we get a movie that's just as much an excuse to establish a forthcoming threat in this particular thread of the overarching narrative of this current phase or sequence or whatever they want to call it, as well as to set up the next season of one of the studio's multiple television shows, as it is to give us an adventure featuring the title characters.

All of this has become the norm for these movies, and the good news is that one doesn't need to have watched all or any of the Marvel TV series to understand what's going on in this movie installment. Oh, it would be a benefit, to be sure, but screenwriter Jeff Loveness at least fills in the blanks for any audience members who might find themselves behind on the television shows. One gets the feeling this won't be a benefit granted to us in the near future, so let's appreciate it while we can.

It is, though, becoming increasingly difficult to appreciate these movies as individual pieces of media and narrative. As of late, the enterprise has become more of a take-what-you-can-get-while-you-can-still-get-it endeavor than anything else. Some of the installments take risks in terms of tone and narrative scope. Others still feel bogged down by introducing us to a new hero or a batch of them with the usual formula, and there's always some sense that we're supposed to be looking for the connective tissue that binds this new sequence of movies and TV programs together.

When it doesn't arrive, there's some sense of a letdown, and is that really where we're at with the biggest media franchise likely in the entire history of entertainment? It's disappointing when the stories aren't allowed to be self-contained, and it's just as disappointing when the teases toward some big narrative arc are left only as teases.

All of this isn't to say much about the newest adventure of Paul Rudd's Ant-Man, aka Scott Lang, and his greatly reduced (not a pun about size but a note about screen time) sidekick, Evangeline Lilly's Wasp/Hope Van Dyne, and that's part of the problem here. There simply isn't too much to say about Ant-Man, the Wasp, and their cohorts—his daughter Cassie (Kathryn Newton), who now wears a size-shifting costume, and her parents (played by Michael Douglas and Michelle Pfeiffer). In the amusing introduction, we learn that Scott has let the fame of helping to save the world go to his head, but soon enough, the quintet is sucked through a contraption to the subatomic world of the Quantum Realm.

From there, the movie does a lot of teasing about some terrible threat, while also showcasing a lot of sporadically colorful but mostly dingy landscapes and a couple of quirky creatures via visual effects. Returning director Peyton Reed, whose previous two entries of the isolated Ant-Man movies let the filmmaker have some fun with the superhero clichés and formula, has been left with little personality to put on display here, apart from some of the odder creatures and letting Bill Murray essentially play himself in a superhero tale. It feels as if we're being cheated of one of the few major characters in this franchise who could get away with undermining the interconnected mess the whole thing is becoming.

Instead, Ant-Man—and occasionally the Wasp—is set against Kang the Conqueror (Jonathan Majors), a being capable of traversing the multiverse and of seeing the whole of time and space. Some will know this character—or at least one iteration of him—from the TV show "Loki," and those who do in the audience will also get a repeat of a big speech explaining his back story and motives. Not everyone has the time for this expanding franchise, although it's becoming more and more apparent that the producers want us to make it.

If the villain sounds over-the-top and destructive on some existential level, he is, until he very much isn't at key points in the third act, but Majors' performance is so grounded and subdued that Kang comes across as existentially melancholy about being doomed to bring doom to countless dimensions and their inhabitants. A striking makeup choice gives Kang a pair of scars that travel down from each eye, as if a permanent stream of tears is on his face or that millennia's worth of now-dried-up tears have eroded his flesh.

The general oddity and winking humor that have come to define Ant-Man, who's aware of his lower rank on the superhero hierarchy of popularity, have mostly dissipated in this installment (A big-headed secondary villain is too strange and too cheaply designed to be as funny as his screen time would seem to reflect). Without those qualities, Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania becomes just another stepping stone in some bigger plot picture that may finally be coming together—no matter how much personality needs to be sacrificed to get there, apparently.

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