Movie Review: Ant-Man and the Wasp Quantumania

Ant-Man to me is one of the more interesting heroes in the MCU in my personal opinion. There’s just something about the bite-size hero’s unique charm that draws me into his movies far more often than some of the other ones tend to. I think a lot of it comes down to how well these films capitalize on the concept of a man who can shrink to the size of an ant. On paper that idea doesn’t sound all that compelling right? Yet it turns out there’s so many ideas and jokes you can create with this concept, especially when you have such a tight-nit cast of actors giving this series a very family-orientated appeal. After two of his own films and appearing in Civil War and Endgame, it’s fair to ask where can Ant-Man go after exploring some already big stories? Well, the idea isn’t to go bigger but to actually go smaller, to a sub-atomic level!

Directed by Peyton Reed and starring Paul Rudd, Evangeline Lilly, Michael Douglas, Michelle Pfeiffer in their familiar roles as Ant-Man and the respective Pym/van-Dyme family; Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania follows the gang as they get sucked into the Quantum Realm after Scott Lang’s daughter Cassie (Now played by Kathryn Newton) creates a device designed to map out the Realm through the use of signalling. Unbeknownst to Cassie however, someone in the Quantum Realm caught onto that signal and that someone is none other than Kang the Conqueror (Played once again by Jonathan Majors). Learning of Ant-Man’s abilities and talent for thievery, he brings Scott and his family down into his domain in hopes of coercing him to steal an item of great importance for him. It’s up to Scott and the gang to figure a way out of Kang’s clutches and escape the Quantum Realm before the Conqueror can reek havoc upon time once again.

In terms of plot, I found the movie to be notably underwhelming on everything besides Kang. The whole idea of this film is it tries to ask who Scott Lang is post-Blip and see how he can redefine his relationship with his daughter Cassie who he missed out on 5 years of her growing up on. The problem here is I didn’t feel any notable drama or struggle in that relationship. We’re lead to believe Cassie is rebellious in nature and wants to fight for what’s right and the film can’t figure out a natural way to make Scott be opposed to this besides ‘just because’. Their so-called rift is made out to be a central crux of the narrative but I never for one minute felt like there was one. Hope, Hank and Janet aren’t utilized in the best of ways in this film here and really only feel like background dressing until the story calls for their attention. I wish the concept of the Quantum Realm as a living breathing domain was explored far more than what we got. The opening 45 minutes showcased the raw potential of the layered microverse with so many visuals but that quickly gets put aside to put focus on the main plot. It’s hard to devote much care for this world when it’s not given all that much room to breath.

The one saving grace of this film’s narrative is Kang though. By this point we all know Kang is intended to be the big bad of this new saga in the MCU, so to have him pop up here we all hoped to see a true glimpse of what makes this character worthy of that position; Jonathan Majors delivers on that hope on so many aspects thankfully. Kang as an individual is filled with so many intriguing characteristics yet despite learning more about him you always feel like this guy has so much more depth. His mannerisms and demeanour are all perfected by Majors in a way which helps make him the best part of this film for me. I can’t help but feel it was a mis-fire to introduce this variant of Kang this early however as I feel the direction they are going to go with future variants of Kangs may end up becoming more strenuous than anything else. As far as his presence in this film goes however, I honestly feel Kang the Conqueror is another excellent addition to Marvels latest run of villains.

On a visual end I do admire how much creativity there is in this movie. The Quantum Realm is a near limitless playground of visual concepts and as I implied earlier, the film does a novel job in exploring that potential for the first 45 minutes at least. There’s a lot of moments in this movie where visual cues are used to help further the narrative in some really interesting ways. There’s one particular sequence in which Scott is caught in a probability storm and the visual idea being played with here are mesmerising to say the least. I can’t fault this film for trying it’s very best to be creative in its output, not every idea works but on a visual end you can recognize that it’s trying harder than most at the very least.

Tone wisem I do feel like the film is somewhat at odds with itself. Where the first two films had a more natural comedic structure, I do feel Quantumania does struggle to decide when it wants to be serious and when it wants to be funny. Another note I want to make is MCU has a tendency to overdo it on what I tend to consider generic comedy elements. It was probably the main reason I hated Thor: Love and Thunder so much and in Quantumania while it’s not nearly as prevalent it does kind of feel that the unique Ant-Man style comedy has fallen wayside to the typic MCU style jokes. There’s a much snappier and interesting side to the humour to these films and it’s just a shame Quantumania loses that particular edge.

On a whole there is nothing majorly wrong with Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania, it’s perfectly serviceable as far as Marvel films go. It’s just a shame it doesn’t really realize it’s full potential a lot of the time. Everything feels undercooked besides Kang and even then it’s hard to say we’ll likely get the same type of Kang in future stories going forward. For a hero capable of going both big and small when the situation calls for it, this time Ant-Man doesn’t seem to match the size requirements on either end and that’s a bit sad to say really.