Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania
The “Ant-Man” movies live by the unspoken mantra of “think small,” a philosophy that has allowed them to paradoxically stand apart from other corners of the Marvel Cinematic Universe, which tends toward the grandiose. “Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania” toys with that idea by shrinking Ant-Man/Scott Lange (Paul Rudd) and co down to subatomic size 10 minutes into the story and sending them off to the Quantum Realm, which looks like James Cameron’s Pandora reimagined as the cover of a 1970s jazz fusion album, where they remain for most of the movie as they fight an exiled supervillain named Kang (Jonathan Majors). It is both the biggest and smallest of the Ant-Man films at once, which is pretty neat.
Is it worth seeing? Not really; though its middle hour is fun in that patented breezy “Ant-Man” way. Returning director Peyton Reed and screenwriter Jeff Loveness let their characters wander around in this Quantum Realm, which plays like a psychedelic sci-fi cartoon version of those jungles in 1930s serials where some clueless Western explorer would misinterpret a gesture and piss off a local tribe, or get dunked in a river by an elephant, or be grossed out by snake meat until he took a bite and realized it tasted kind of like chicken.
Here we have tribesmen with flashlight heads, others with transparent gelatinous bodies who are obsessed with how many “holes” human beings have (the comedic highlight of Rudd’s performance is the pause he takes while Scott does math on his fingers), still another who can hear others’ wild thoughts race through his mind constantly (William Jackson Harper), telepathically. Instead of elephants there are houses that look like Fred Flintstone’s crib mated with Pillsbury Doughboy, only they’re alive and can walk around and fight in wars, not to mention gelatinous bugs and other critters, shrubs and trees that are modeled on fungi or lichens or something, Godzilla-scaled mitochondrial whatsits.
They all seem based on photographs of “small worlds” at various magnification levels. That the designers have grouped together these various microscopic or subatomic things simply because they are “small” is part of the fun of it. It’s like something a kid threw together for a science fair, hoping that cuteness alone will compensate for a lack of any actual scientific content whatsoever. Too bad that, for all its self mocking jokes about it being too self mocking and formulaic (and thus somehow beyond criticism), most of the world onscreen looks like a Marvel screensaver, Bill Pope shot the “Matrix” films and multiple Sam Raimi and Edgar Wright movies, but you wouldn’t know it from looking at this one. There isn’t much for a cinematographer (or director even Ryan Coogler has seemed tamped down by Marvel) to do to show individual personality on these projects when so much of the running time is previsualized by effects companies; and Kevin Feige, who seems determined to keep art to an absolute minimum here lest he gum up the content machine’s works any further, wields an aesthetic veto pen.
They call Kang a “ret-con” in genre parlance. In this film, he has to be an extremely powerful villain who needs no introduction (he’s essentially Thanos in a new skin a genocidal maniac) and must therefore come into being so that the next Avengers team up can quickly establish him as the Big Bad. But they also have to account for why Janet van Dyne (Michelle Pfeiffer), former wife of original Ant-Man Hank Pym (Michael Douglas), who spent 30 years stuck in the Quantum Realm, never mentioned Kang to anyone.
It’s not convincing though Pfeiffer does her damnedest. But it is a comic book movie, so you go with it. At least Pfeiffer gets lots of stuff to do in terms of pushing the plot along while papering over storytelling cracks; Hope/the Wasp (Evangeline Lilly) just sort of seems to be there, present and involved but making very little impression. (Narratively speaking she’s been eclipsed by Cassie. The last one was more the Pyms’ movie anyway, and this one’s really Scott and Cassie time, what with her having become an actual teenager with her own supersuit and all, played by Kathryn Newton. But they still managed to give Michael Douglas plenty of good bits.)
Kang is bad character writing he’s bad! He’s mad! He’s brilliant! He wants out of the Quantum Realm! And that’s pretty much it; there are only so many ways that cast or filmmakers can make us feel terror about such a guy. The film doesn’t have the guts (or maybe permission from up high at Marvel Studios?) to play for keeps in audience-stunning fashion like the last act of “Avengers: Infinity War,” or that middle hour or so of “Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom.” There is a momentary scene where Kang convinces Scott to use his thief abilities to steal this movie’s equivalent of the Ring of Power or Infinity Stone or Mother Box by threatening to murder Cassie in front of him, then make Scott experience her death over and over through eternity. But we know it’s not that kind of movie, nor one where any major character we care about is likely to suffer too much.
So Majors’ performance as Kang goes hammily against type. He appears to be channeling Brando performances post-1970s where the actor was being fed lines through an earpiece or reading them off notecards taped to other performers’ costumes. Sometimes he will pause for what feels like minutes between words within a line while staring at nothing, or up, or off to one side, as if the next thought might be lurking thereabouts. Like Brando, he is fiddling around in ways that seem at cross-purposes with but are actually in service of trying to make something out of nothing. One intriguing element: Kang seems deeply, furiously sad which calls back to one of “The Sopranos”’ most profound lines: “Depression is anger turned inward.”
Eventually, though, the film falls into full MCU formula and spends its last act on way too busy CGI battles where things crash into other things and explode and disintegrate while people shout about having to save the universe.
Sometimes the picture overdoes it on self awareness within the unfortunate MCU way like when a character says “That was weird” to confirm that, yes, something weird just happened or declares that another character is cool, both things happen here. However, the low-stress, low-stakes approach of this film is what saves it.
The Ant-Man movies have never appeared to be terribly worried about smashing box office records or winning Oscars, they seem like they’d rather be smart entertainments with heart but not too much heart. This series walks a fine line from the size jokes to the running gags to Rudd’s casting as a guy who has always seemed like some random regular dude who wandered into stardom and finds it all mildly preposterous between being light and being lightweight, sentimental (anything involving Scott and Cassie) versus cheerfully deranged (the climatic fight atop a Thomas the Tank Engine train set at the end of the first movie). Ant-Man is officially an Avenger now, part of Marvel’s starting lineup in that franchise, but he feels more like somebody who gets called up from Triple A when Thor calls in sick. And this new movie validates Scott’s not quite insecurity (he’s not deep enough for existential torment) by having him literally get mistaken for other superheroes. He takes it in stride. Two movies ago he got fired from Baskin Robbins. Before that he was in jail. Size matters? Happiness does too.
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