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Tripwire Reviews Ant-Man And The Wasp: Quantumania

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3 years ago

February 19, 2023

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Mediocrity On A Sub Atomic Level

Ant-Man And The Wasp: Quantumania is out in cinemas now and here Tripwire’s editor-in-chief Joel Meadows takes a look at it. Warning: major spoilers ahead…

Ant-man And The Wasp: Quantumania
Director: Peyton Reed
Stars: Paul Rudd, Evangeline Lilly, Michael Douglas, Jonathan Majors, Kathryn Newton, Michelle Pfeiffer

When Ant-man was released in 2015, expectations for it were pretty low so it hit all of the marks needed for a Marvel Cinematic Universe superhero comedy. When its sequel, Ant-Man And The Wasp was released in 2018, it wasn’t quite as enjoyable but it was still a likeable superhero film. So five years on with Covid and the start of a new MCU Phase on Ant-man’s small but solid shoulders, how does this threequel starring The Avengers’ least likely hero fare?

Paul Rudd always offers big screen warmth in his portrayal of ex-con Scott Lang and that is still on display here. We are introduced to Kathryn Newton who plays Lang’s daughter Cassie, now a teenager and filled with rage at the world. Cassie, it seems, has been messing around with experiments to allow our world to see into the Quantum Realm, the place where her grandmother Janet Van Dyne (Pfeiffer) was trapped in for three decades until they rescued her. Unfortunately Cassie and Hank Pym (Douglas) have’t considered that if we can see them, then logic dictates that they will be able to see us too. Janet hasn’t been totally honest with her family and there is something or more precisely someone who is trapped down in the realm who would be a threat to the larger world if he was ever freed. So the whole family is sucked into the Quantum Realm where we discover that not only did Janet have a fling with former freedom fighter Lord Krylar (a totally pointless and redundant cameo from Bill Murray), she also met up with Marvel’s new movie threat Kang The Conqueror (Majors) and promised that she would help him escape his microscopic prison. Corey Stoll, Lang’s former adversary Derek, has been remade as Kang’s twisted lackey here: M.O.D.O.K (another character too many to be honest).

Phew that’s probably the longest plot précis I’ve ever had to write.

Ant-man And The Wasp: Quantumania starts positively enough with grown-up Cassie’s introduction, meeting a diminished Kang down in the realm and encountering the bizarre denizens of the Quantum Realm (although many of these ideas come ripped straight out of other films like Star Wars and Mad Max).

Van Dyne’s duplicity does initially make for an intriguing plot device, making the audience doubt her trustworthiness as a character. However once we are introduced to people like the rebels fighting against Kang and Krylar, the film descends into the usual rough and tumble punch-up between Scott and Kang. There is also no real chemistry between Rudd and Lilly here and Douglas looks fairly bored throughout too.

The problem here and it is a problem that Marvel has had since Avengers: Endgame was released back in 2019 is where do you go once you’ve destroyed the universe? The MCU has tried to build up new threats like Kang The Conqueror who will play a major part in the next two Avengers films coming in 2024 but after the high drama of Thanos, it just feels like a bit of a damp squib.

There is a lot riding on this film as setting up what is to come next in the Marvel Cinematic Universe but it just feels like it could have done with a tighter script and a better overall sense of cohesion.

Jonathan Majors, who we were introduced to back in Loki on Disney Plus, is a decent enough antagonist here but he doesn’t have the same sense of scale that was on display with Josh Brolin’s Thanos, who really did feel like an unstoppable force of nature.

There are two post-credit sequences here, both featuring Kang setting things up for what comes next.

Ant-Man And The Wasp: Quantumania isn’t a totally awful film as some of the ideas on display here are fun but it collapses under the weight of trying to jam in too many concepts into a two-hour running time.

Ant-man began as a throwaway Marvel big-screen character and he works best as a bit player. Once you try to reinvent him as a lynchpin like Thor or Captain America, he just doesn’t feel credible. Small really was beautiful in the first film and even to a lesser extent in the second one.

Marvel have been struggling to engage with audiences in quite the same degree as it did in the earlier phases with box office takings less consistently impressive than those they used to attract. It has little competition at the moment so it will do decently in terms of takings but Marvel really needs to up its game if it can match the heady heights of what it achieved last decade, if such a thing is still possible.

Ant-Man And The Wasp: Quantumania is out now in cinemas