2/16/23 - Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania (2023) - 3+/4-/10

It is kind of crazy that this is the 3rd Ant-Man movie, a trilogy that I don't’ think anyone asked for, but we keep gobbling up on this never-ending MCU train to nowhere. I wasn’t a big fan of either of the first 2, the original at least having some lightness and humor with scaled back stakes and the sequel just being tired and uninteresting, the third shoots for the moon…and completely misses. Gone is the wit and frivolity, replaced by an universe ending crushing implosion. There was plenty of time for cuteness, charm, and endearing familial hijinks, but we get self-seriousness and faux intensity - really gutting the only things that these previous Ant-Man films had brought to the table.

We all shrink down to the subatomic Quantum realm in this one, a conveyor belt of Star Wars cantina rejects jerkily shuffled on a green screen. The rules of this universe exist only in the necessary spaces to tell the story du jour and we shuffle through gleep glops, dispensing with any semblance of character or building story. I waited a day to let this one sit with me before I wrote something, and that day has expunged any semblance of consequential character or action set-pieces from my memory. Nothing in this film sticks with you other than Kang.

Kang is an all-time villain in the comics. Wrapped up in dalliances between chaotic neutral and chaotic evil, he is a tortured man out of time seeking to fulfill his violence-laced aims by whatever means necessary. That same gravitas is felt by Jonathan Majors, bringing us a new variant of the previously-seen-in-Loki villain. Majors inhabits the role, giving him quirks and irreverent nuance, but much of that is undercut when the Ant family is able to kick his butt. I’m sure he will be back, but anyone who can be outwitted and outfought by this rag tag group of size changers guts any fear or exultation we might have had for him, mentioning killing many multiversal Avengers and destroying whole timelines aside (would have been nice to see a flashback or something instead of hearing about it).

Really, it all falls into the same macguffin laden superhero nonsense like so many others. Yes, there is the big bad flibbertigibbet that Scott must get for the bad guy to save his family, but the tables are turned and blah blah energy beams and space portals blah blah. We get the hot topic of multiverses and variants, but unlike Spider-Man or Doctor Strange or Loki where they used it as key plot points of the most vital importance, this variation on that riff is completely inconsequential and throwaway. They sacrificed all of the heart and identifiable connection that existed in previous iterations to blandly tell this epic tale of galactic war on a quantum scale and it just comes off as boring and stakesless. MODOK seemed tacked on, as was the rest of the Ant crew, and the freedom fighters were generic and yawn worthy.

I think you either get caught up in some type of sci-fi whimsy here, enjoying the ride to strange new lands and unique character possibilities or you find yourself slumming it in a vast vacuous CGI plain of mediocrity, quickly losing any of the drive, excitement or sheer fun that you expected to accompany you on this journey. Unfortunately, for me, I wound up with tickets for the latter and was left thoroughly unimpressed.