Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania

dir: Peyton Reed

2023

The Ant-Man flicks at least previously had the purpose of being lower stakes, a bit silly, a bit goofy, and more comedic than the serious / serious universe ending crap.

Now, no-one trusts that Paul Rudd on his own, with the help of his mates, and occasionally his girlfriend, is enough to carry a flick. Now it has to be him against a multiverse spanning supervillain who, I dunno, wants to control everything. Why can’t he just steal some shit and help people out?

Nup, they have to use his flick to presage the entry of another Thanos-type villain, except this time he’s like the worst person in every single universe, so even if they kill a whole bunch of him / them, there’s plenty more where he came from.

Most of the flick transpires in the Quantum Realm, a realm below the sub-atomic, which is basically considered to be just a freaky looking place where there’s people and strange organisms, and sentient broccoli-headed dudes, but mostly it’s just like yet another planet in Star Wars. Some of the visuals are okay. Mostly it’s just a missed opportunity.

The flick hinges a lot on Janet Van Dyne’s character (Michelle Pfeiffer) not having told anyone about what she got up to for 30 years when she was trapped in the Quantum Realm. It’s been years, but she never thought to tell anyone about how there was a super scary tyrant that she helped rise to power, or that she banged Bill Murray. You would think she would have told someone about that, but then again, maybe she regretted it a tad.

The sex with Bill Murray, I mean, not the tyrant-enabling, but then I’m not completely sure.

In theory I guess anything is possible in a place that’s beyond our capability to understand presently. Maybe there is a realm like the Quantum Realm. I just find it a bit hard to believe that people, shrunk down to be even smaller than atoms, than sub-atomic particles, would then just find people there, chilling, drinking stuff, living in living buildings.

There’s these people, and I guess they’re like savages or Ewoks or something. I think they had a leader (Katy M O’Brian), who hits things with a spear?

Regardless, this is a flick that felt really long despite being way shorter than the average Marvel flick. I mean most of them go for a school semester these days, but this one is just 2 hours. Still, it’s about half an hour too long.

It also doesn’t really do anything, other than introduce Kang the Conqueror as a villain for future movies, which already happened in the Loki series. Essentially, it just does what happened there, just with a different Kang saying “if you kill me a worse me will come along”, and then someone killing him anyway.

And family, something about family. The importance thereof.

And something about Ant-Man’s daughter wanting to use the power to shrink real small to help the homeless and the oppressed, or something.

What it doesn’t have is Michael Peña playing Luis, who was funny as fuck in the first two movies. What it doesn’t have is the strange David Dastmalchian as that weird Russian hacker, or T.I. as, um, the guy that drives the van. Where are these chaps when you need them?

They probably wanted too much money. Anyway, it’s left to the core family of people with shrinking suits to do whatever it is they do to save the day and get back to the world “up there”, as they keep saying.

As if they’re underground, or Borrowers or something.

Kang is going to prove to be something of a liability both to us in the audience and to Marvel more broadly. Johnathan Majors has an odd, somewhat stilted way of delivering dialogue, but the bigger problem is going to be that the actor apparently is something of a piece of shit that enjoys beating up on women. Now that in itself isn’t a guarantee that his career is over, because honestly, even if he killed people enough people would probably stat bitching that the victims had it coming and probably deserved it. But he’s not a big enough earner, enough of a star to be able to be protected from the consequences of his own actions. He’s not Johnny Depp yet, or any number of jerks who get away with it for decades and then start sobbing about how “cancel culture” is adversely impacting on their paycheck.

As a villain Kang is, I dunno, kind of dull. He’s supremely confident, and speaks calmly, until he doesn’t get his way, and then he starts yelling. You know, like most jerks. Time will only tell if they can make something worthwhile out of this inauspicious set of introductions, or whether he’ll ultimately either a) be replaced like they did with Terrence Howard, or b) just yells louder.

Wanting them to stop making Marvel movies I think is a waste of anyone’s energies, especially mine, since there’s no way they’re going to stop, even though we’re getting to the stage where it doesn’t even matter which hero is the main one or the movie is named after – insert location / insert name of hero here, make sure everything blows up in the end, tease the new threat for the next flick in the mid-credits scene, call back to previous Marvel movies – done!

We are well trained enough not to mind too much, if even what we’re getting isn’t totally distinguishable from even other generic properties owned by Disney that aren’t Marvel. Through them all in the blender, and pretty soon even we won’t be able to tell the difference.

I think the recent flicks like Love and Thunder, Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness and Wakanda Forever, and very much this flick here represent with a certain amount of clarity that they’re going to start eating their young. What I mean is, they’ve gone past the point of being able to create anything novel that we haven’t seen before, they’re spending $200 mill per movie, so they’re never going to risk that money by doing anything that daring, so it’s maybe left to the Marvel series to do anything interesting, that doesn’t look like a visual hangover.

Bill fucking Murray – if I wasn’t already tired of the laziness and creative bankruptcy that these flicks represented, the moment I saw that fucker I thought “this shit is played out”. The Bill Murray cameo is pretty much code for “we done run the fuck out of ideas” for any movie or film series. Just say no to Bill, people.

I’m dreading that they’re going to give him a guest spot on Only Murders in the Building, just because Paul Rudd is in the 3rd season. Anyway, I really should praise at least some of the stuff that works. Paul Rudd as this Scott Lang character continues to be all “aw shucks” as someone who has no real business being in the superheroic game who still somehow stays a shitkicker and saves the day as required. I don’t know if it’s a class thing, or because he’s such a C-list hero, but it still remains amusing as to the fact that he hasn’t died a thousand times yet, and that his girlfriend Hope (Evangeline Lilly) is way better at the heroic stuff than he is.

And she can fly, but that’s neither here nor there. For all the genericness of this story, Rudd doesn’t phone in his scenes, and tries to at least be lighter and funnier than this material ever has a right to be. He gets along well with the other kids. Michael Douglas is so fucking old in this, but he gets the saltiest lines, mostly at Scott’s expense.

The relationship with Cassie (Kathryn Newton) is meant to be the one motivator that transcends all for Scott, but honestly, despite being an adult she’s an annoying brat, and keeps taunting Scott with “well, what have you done to save the world lately?”, which is just dumb stuff. It’s like yelling at a fireman that they’re lazy because they’re not putting out any fires currently, mostly because nothing’s on fire currently. Should they be lighting fires just to put some out?

Let the man rest, for fuck’s sake.

I get the feeling there aren’t going to be any Ant-specific movies any more, which is fine. I think we’ve reached the limits of what this character can do in the cinematic medium. Maybe give him a series or something.

And as for the Kang bullshit, don’t blame me, I voted for Kodos.

5 times the living buildings thing was interesting for a few seconds out of 10

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“But he also said something bad was coming and that everyone would die if he didn't get out. Wait, so did I just kill everyone? Is everyone gonna die because of me? Oh my God. Oh my... what did I do? What... what did I do?” – Sunday morning remorse - Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania