If you want to know what’s unimpeachably great about Peyton Reed’s otherwise frustrating Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania, all you must do is look at the huge face on the teaser poster. Jonathan Majors is, without a doubt, the best thing to happen to the MCU since Avengers: Endgame, and, importantly, he’s not crammed into the same four-color box as every other character on screen. His introduction in Loki served as a decent establishment for their interpretation of Kang the Conqueror. Still, he’s astonishing here for a key reason: In what feels like forever, he’s the only character to say what they mean in a Marvel movie without some manner of jokey eliding of their seriousness. After all, in Kevin Feige’s cinematic universe, the truly damning thing one can do is get in the way of a good time – it doesn’t matter if you destroy a planet or a city or wipe half of the universe off of the map, but if you threaten the Marvel enterprise with some amount of conviction in your heart, you become public enemy number one. This is what separates their best villains (Thanos, Red Skull, that one SHIELD higher-up that Robert Redford played) from those who will be quickly dispatched with and quickly forgotten or from the antiheroics of protagonists-in-waiting like Loki and/or Scarlet Witch. They’re serious, and intimidatingly so.
Majors is astonishingly good at conveying an entire character’s worldview within a single facial expression, and with the amount of information withheld from the audience about Kang’s origins and perspective here, having an antagonist – exiled by an unknown force to, essentially, the Phantom Zone, which he soon, of course, conquers and plots his grand-scale revenge upon the universe at large (while he is also the only person who can save it from the terror slowly making its way down the pipeline towards unaware universes) – you need a person like him to sell the threat he poses appropriately. He’s a perpetually frustrated near demi-god, capable of time and multiversal travel, forced to patronizingly acknowledge the whims of people whose doubles he’s killed thousands of times over, and it’s a genuinely compelling role that he absolutely nails. He’s a full-on Jack Kirby creation brought to life with the dynamism that that descriptor entails.
It’s a shame, then, that he’s forced to contend with the goofy goobers of the Ant-Man franchise, who are charming in their own little established world but painfully out of their league here, given the stakes and circumstances. Janet (Michelle Pfieffer), freed by her long-suffering family from the confines of the Quantum Realm after a 30-year stint down there in the last film, has plenty of history with Kang, and she’s, frankly, ashamed of it. So, in trying to preserve some domestic bliss with her husband Hank (Michael Douglas) and daughter Hope (Evangeline Lilly), she doesn’t tell them about what’s lurking down there, waiting for the right opportunity to strike. But it turns out that her step-granddaughter Cassie (Kathyrn Newton, who is both the third person to take this role and apparently an amazing golfer) has a budding interest in tech and has, with the help of Hank and Hope, created a sort of satellite that can track things within the subatomic world. This astonishes her father, Scott Lang (Paul Rudd), in its good intentions: They’ve been having their own issues in the time since he saved the world with the Avengers, and she’s done so to prevent him – or Janet, for that matter – from ever being trapped down there for an extended period. But Janet freaks out, knowing that Kang exists, and, sure enough, the satellite becomes a miniature black hole, sucking the whole family (and a colony of ants) into the vortex, where the Conquerer is waiting to exact his vengeance after, of course, he forces them to help him free himself from his dimensional prison. It’s a lot. What happened to robbing houses and fighting off Walton Goggins?
It’s not a terrible plot, frankly, at least when you put it down on paper, and the possibilities are, in fact, endless: One could do whatever they want with an environment as full of rich potential as this one is. But what’s so disappointing about Quantumania is how committed it is to preserving the sameness of the MCU in style and tone at the expense of any identity it might have, an overcorrection from the days when the brass decided to toss cash at Chloe Zhao to try and give them some artistic bonafide without recognizing that said cash was being watched by shareholders like vultures over a roadside rabbit’s corpse. It feels like Feige and company, cognizant that this is “the birth of a new Dynasty” or whatever, attempted to fundamentally strip Reed of whatever little style he brought to these films. The supporting cast, apparently, never returned from the Snappening (this is a joke, as I’m fully aware that they all probably did in-universe), which means Michael Pena’s not around to do his goofy little summaries and that Judy Greer and Bobby Cannavale aren’t there to provide some additional perspective on Scott’s superheroics and how they affect his relationships with others, chiefly his daughter.
It’s bizarre to think that this is a movie concerned with creating the Ant-Man family at large, but the few folks who might be genuinely opposed to a teenager running about in a size-altering costume and causing trouble in an effort to try and prevent other calamities are totally absent. Reed deserves some props for how deep his roster is – even missing most of these famous faces, I was often struck by how well-used he uses the continuing members of the Ant-Man cast, which is a testament to how charming Rudd, Douglas, and Pfieffer can be, with Douglas being one of the few guys left in this universe who can properly pull off a classical one-liner without it feeling like “banter.” The comic-relief-oriented members of the ensemble do well enough, with Bill Murray showing up for a few minutes to troll Douglas and William Jackson Harper amiably suffering through the proceedings as a psychic who just can’t help being able to read the thoughts of those who are directly across him. Even David Dastmalchian finds himself in the action, albeit in a different role, and earns one of the film’s best laughs. But goofy asides with actors from I Think You Should Leave and cameos from the likes of Gregg Turkington or Tom Scharpling aren’t proof that Reed still had some sort of genuine control over the project and replace what’s missing here stylistically.
See, I don’t think the Ant-Man franchise was ever really meant to be the kind of anchor that Feige wants Quantumania to be, and before Spider-Man’s introduction in the MCU, Scott Lang was our only street-level superhero in the universe, at least at the multiplex. He wasn’t rich or a scientific genius or a thunder god or a super-spy or the embodiment of the Greatest Generation’s mythos and ideals: he was a dumbass crook with a heart of gold who fucked around and found out when it came to robbing the wrong house one night. Reed found his character’s identity and world in that difference, and I’d argue that, at least in the first installment, he did a solid job (with some manner of assist from Edgar Wright and Joe Cornish’s pre-viz work) keeping things level and relatively focused on the genuinely wondrous aspects of the character’s powerset. People like to see very small things become very big (and if I were to get pop psychology on exactly why, it’s because the changing perspectives remind us of our own experiences growing in size), and that is a pretty easy sell.
Having his protagonist deal with the pressures of success and fame is one thing – Rudd really is well-suited to the kind of buffoonery that a successful moron like Scott would gravitate towards once they became an internationally famous hero – but using this character as the entry point to this next part of the overall saga makes it mirror Scott’s own sort of dog-catching-the-car purposelessness, and it puts everyone involved in it behind the scenes at the mercy of The Grand Design. I’d argue that this is why the Quantum Realm, rendered with some vivid color in the second installment, feels like a generic world from one of Feige’s space operas. Essentially, this weird and mystical realm, with almost limitless possibilities in how it could be depicted, is just another version of Jeff Goldblum’s world in Thor: Ragnorak, complete with inter-dimensional refugee camps and a reigning tyrant or one of James Gunn’s Guardians sets with a few extra nods to size-changing tossed in now and then. There are a few nice touches – the bizarre living spaceships that the anti-Kang factions use are pretty cool, honestly, and Reed can embrace the ick factor of bio-engineering as a way to make some of the details at least a little more lively – but it’s almost as if Feige just handed him the Waititi playbook and said “Do this, but make it feel a little different. Also, have you seen Dune yet?”
Of course, plenty of what’s wrong with Quantumania can also be attributed to the pandemic’s effect on Marvel’s shooting schedule and how they run their sets. This retreat into the fully digital world, with CGI costumes and all, may have been a concession to the practical methods of making a big-budget franchise spectacle under a fair amount of restrictions, but like No Way Home, this ethos sucks what little amount of background vivacity remains in these movies so that it may be appropriately controlled and manipulated to shape the arc of the MCU at large. It is, I guess, what happens when you don’t have a Fantastic Four around to introduce one of their villains, or when you don’t have a Doctor Doom or Reed Richards to kick off your Jonathan Hickman-inspired Secret Wars arc: You load up on the Kangs, try to find his motivations elsewhere, and pray that it comes together quick enough for you to get to whatever further installment down the line will reestablish the suspenseful stakes that you had with Thanos and company just a few years ago without doing the 10-plus years of legwork to get people to give a shit about how it all turns out.
As an Ant-Man movie, Quantumania is probably the worst possible outcome, taking the character to places that wholly conflict with how the character was established and making his powers bland, all to the detriment of its value as entertainment. Still, as another Merry Marvel Continuity Exercise, it could be a lot worse. At least they have a compellingly-acted villain again, even if they aren’t quite sure what to do with him on the way to their destination.