Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania (2023)

Welcome to Phase Five of the Marvel Cinematic Universe, a phrase that might not mean much of anything to the mainstream critics, who are starting to sniff at Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania. Truth be told, this is the 31st film in the MCU, and fatigue may be setting in, especially considering that three of the last seven Marvel flicks were duds. In actuality, Quantumania is proof positive that we’ve been spoiled over the last fifteen years – Marvel spent so much time upping its own game that it can’t keep competing at that level. Quantumania is fine, but that used to be a much lower bar.
 
Scott Lang (Paul Rudd) is riding high after helping to save the universe in Avengers: Endgame. While Hope Van Dyne (Evangeline Lilly) is saving the world with her humanitarian foundation, Scott’s daughter Cassie (Kathryn Newton) has begun her own explorations of the Quantum Realm, which will drag Scott, Hope, and her parents (Michael Douglas and Michelle Pfeiffer) into a conflict with one of the Quantum Realm’s most feared inhabitants – Kang the Conqueror (Jonathan Majors).
 
As we’re entering Phase Five, firmly entrenched in what the marketing boys are calling “The Multiverse Saga,” Quantumania feels a bit like a cross between table setting and the first course. It’s got to introduce Kang, our new big bad, while following up on at least the appearance of He Who Remains in the first season of Loki. For those who didn’t see it, He Who Remains was also played by Jonathan Majors, who teed up the notion that we’d be seeing lots of versions of him, traversing the multiverse and causing all sorts of Avengers-level havoc. Meanwhile, No Way Home and Multiverse of Madness have been hinting at all the bad things that might happen when parallel universes collide (in short, multiversal incursions, the deaths of whole universes, and plots glued together by fan service).
 
It’s heady stuff, and if you’re not already bought into the MCU project, you’ll probably have checked out long ago. If you’re a tried-and-true Marvel Zombie, you might be bored by all this in light of recent middling fare. And if you’re only in it for Ant-Man (I have to believe there are some of you out there), this movie might not be as zany as its subtitle promises. All of which is to say that Quantumania is a weird movie, and it may not be transcendent or titanically significant, but it is good clean fun, a worthy diversion for two hours. And I liked it well enough to say that if you’ve come this far with Marvel, Quantumania isn’t worth bidding the franchise farewell.
 
For starters, Quantumania is a very good time. Paul Rudd is effortlessly charming as Ant-Man, having lost none of his aw-shucks charm or good-natured wonderment. When something amazing happens, he breathlessly fires off one-liners like, “Boy, a lot’s happened today,” which is more my speed compared to the scatological or postmodern humor that’s pervaded much of the superhero genre lately (looking at you, Gunn and Waititi). The key is that the joke is never on the material or on the audience, but rather on the situation or on the characters – and it helps that Rudd is a genuinely funny individual (and just a genuine mensch all around).
 
Ant-Man’s usual gang (including Michael Peña, David Dastmalchian, and T.I.) are nowhere to be seen, but Douglas and Pfeiffer are stellar as Hank Pym and Janet Van Dyne; Douglas is bemusingly charming, while Pfeiffer never buckles under the weight of the expositional retcons her character is used to deploy. It’s only too bad that they don’t have much to do in the film’s climax, because we’ve never gotten to see the original Ant-Man and Wasp in full action. We’re also introduced to Kathryn Newton, plucky and precocious; she’s going to make a fine addition to the Young Avengers, once we get around to them, but for now she plays very well against Rudd as his “peanut.”
 
And then there’s Kang. In much of the critical reviews I’ve read for Quantumania, I’ve seen critics praising Jonathan Majors as the one piece of Quantumania that actually works. I’m not quite sure I’d fall over myself just yet – I thought his performance as He Who Remains did more to convince me of Kang’s fearsomeness than actually seeing The Conqueror himself, which is maybe a greater testament to Majors then it sounds. I do wish the film had shown us a little more of Kang rather than simply tell us how evil he is, but then we have a ways to go before The Kang Dynasty in May 2025. Suffice it to say, though, that Majors is right in the pocket with what the film needs him to be, and he’s in a unique and promising position as far as the future of the MCU is concerned. I’m looking forward to seeing a lot more of him.
 
The key to Quantumania is, I think, that it’s not a terrific Marvel movie. It’s a fairly middle-of-the-road outing in a franchise with some exceptional highs and some dismal lows. It might not even be the best Ant-Man movie, which is as an incredible sentence to type as it is to read, but that fact is still better than things like Morbius or 80 For Brady, God save us. Quantumania is, however, a pretty good Star Wars film that just happens to have Ant-Man in it; it’s chock full of bizarre creatures and garish special effects, and if you surrender yourself to the bonkers frivolity and go along for the ride, Quantumania is not going to disappoint. 
 

Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania is rated PG-13 for “violence/action and language.” Directed by Peyton Reed. Written by Jeff Loveness. Based on the Marvel Comics. Starring Paul Rudd, Evangeline Lilly, Jonathan Majors, Kathryn Newton, Bill Murray, Michelle Pfeiffer, and Michael Douglas.

Ant-Man and the Wasp (2018)

Perhaps there will come a day when I have to write a bad review of a Marvel movie, when I have to find a way to tell you to stay away, stay far away. It has nothing (okay, maybe a little) to do with my being something of a shill – a Marvel Zombie, if you will; instead, Marvel Studios is rapidly proving that there is little they cannot do. Where Justice League buckled under the weight of changing directors mid-stream, Marvel not only rebounded when Edgar Wright left the first Ant-Man, they established a brand identity for the little guy in the midst of creative differences and have now managed to build onto what ought to have been an unstable foundation.

Waylaid under house arrest after the events of Captain America: Civil War, Scott Lang (Paul Rudd) has a few days left on his sentence when his old friends Hank Pym (Michael Douglas) and Hope Van Dyne (Evangeline Lilly) reach out to him for help on a case. Scott risks his freedom to don the Ant-Man suit once more – alongside Hope in her new life as The Wasp – in order to collect some tech, reenter the subatomic quantum realm, and protect his friends from the phase-shifting Ghost (Hannah John-Kamen).

Following Infinity War in the way that Ant-Man followed on the heels of Avengers: Age of Ultron, the Ant-Man franchise is garnering a reputation as a palate cleanser for the Marvel Cinematic Universe, a breather away from all the high-stakes sturm und drang of saving the cosmos from extinction-level events. In Ant-Man and the Wasp, as in its predecessor, the focus is not on the fate of the universe but on more personal stakes – smaller plots, if the pun can be forgiven. Rather than put Scott Lang at the heart of ensuring the survival of the galaxy, the Ant-Man films have wisely bent toward the heist genre; “break into a place and steal some stuff,” Hank Pym advised in the first film, and while this film ventures into the quantum realm between molecules, it has nothing to do with tearing apart the foundations of reality.

It’s a task for which Scott Lang would be ill-suited, though one suspects that perhaps Hope Van Dyne might be up to it. There’s a sly joke about her absence from the Leipzig airport battle in Civil War, but her deft hand at superheroics will likely lead audiences to wonder why we’ve had to wait ten years to see The Wasp on the big screen. (Diehard devotees know well, for one, that it was The Wasp who gave The Avengers their name back in their 1963 debut comic.) Lilly is more than fantastic as Hope, a proper scene-stealer who’s exceedingly capable as a hero without the need for so much as a training montage. Paul Rudd’s doing his Paul Rudd thing as Scott, dopey and self-deprecating with a spot-on sense of comedic timing, but the film feels more properly a two-hander with Lilly bearing more than her fair share of the weight – both in terms of action sequences and emotional gravity.

Between this and Incredibles 2, I’m seeing a promising pattern of restraint in our big-budget sequels. Like Edna Mode before him, Michael Peña turns up to revisit Luis, a fan favorite from the first film for his relentless cheeriness and proclivity for shaggy-dog anecdotes. In a lesser version of Ant-Man and the Wasp, we’d get five or six Luis stories (up from two in Ant-Man), but instead Peña and the script recognize that Luis is more interesting if he’s not one-note, if his puppy-dog honesty is matched with new challenges, rife with their own unique opportunities for him to insert a foot into a perpetually open mouth. 

The filmmakers have not, however, exercised restraint in all the size-shifting shenanigans made possible by Pym Particles. Tiny things enlarge, large things shrink, and characters change scale to accommodate any number of sudden developments. Moreover, the characters never lose sight of how cool and hilarious these shifts can be, so we too get to enjoy them all the more. There is something equally engaging about the unpredictability of shape-changing and phase-shifting in this film; at any given moment, one or more of the laws of physics can bend in unexpected but visually stunning ways, making Ant-Man and the Wasp a particularly unique spectacle.

Twenty films into the Marvel Cinematic Universe and mere months after Thanos cut a bloody swath through Earth’s Mightiest Heroes, Ant-Man and the Wasp is perhaps not the most obvious choice for an immediate follow-up, but it’s a welcome breather with a tight focus and a fine knack for summer blockbuster fun. It fits into the larger Marvel tapestry, of course, gesturing forwards and back, but it’s telling that I’m equally enthused about the prospect of a third Ant-Man film, or perhaps just a standalone feature for The Wasp. (Flashbacks in the first film introduced Hope’s mother Janet as the original Wasp; might a third introduce Hank’s other daughter Nadia, for Ant-Man and the Wasps?) Regardless, Marvel has proven itself capable like no other studio at harnessing an audience and leading them to queue up for another helping. More like this, please.

Ant-Man and the Wasp is rated PG-13 for “some sci-fi action violence.” Directed by Peyton Reed. Written by Chris McKenna, Erik Sommers, Paul Rudd, Andrew Barrer, and Gabriel Ferrari. Based on the Marvel Comics by Stan Lee, Larry Lieber, and Jack Kirby. Starring Paul Rudd, Evangeline Lilly, Hannah John-Kamen, Michael Peña, Walton Goggins, Michelle Pfeiffer, Laurence Fishburne, and Michael Douglas. 

The Grand Marvel Rewatch: Ant-Man

Face front, true believers! Welcome to the next astonishing addition to “The Grand Marvel Rewatch,” designed to get us all sufficiently amped up for Captain America: Civil War, which comes out May 6, 2016. Each Wednesday, The Cinema King casts his eye back upon the twelve films in the Marvel Cinematic Universe and offers five salient observations about the caliber of the films and the way they might play into Marvel’s latest installment in America’s favorite franchise.

Today’s fantastic feature film takes us to 2015 for Ant-Man, the finale proper for Phase Two and an unlikely tie-in to Civil War.

1. “I think our first move should be calling The Avengers.” Ant-Man is a superhero movie that doesn’t take itself too seriously, and that manifests even as a response to its own existence within the franchise. We’ve been wondering all along, “Where’s Iron Man? Thor could settle this in a heartbeat. Why didn’t they call Hawkeye?” Ant-Man hangs a lantern on the difficulties of a shared universe, but surprisingly Hank Pym has a solid answer for this one – a disdain for the Stark family that goes way back (and, honestly, how is this the first time anyone’s had a real grudge against the Starks?). I wonder if that grudge gets passed down from Ant-Man to Ant-Man, and if we’ll see it in Civil War... 
2. “How about the fact that I fought an Avenger and didn’t die?” But for all the pondering about where the Avengers are, Ant-Man manages to deliver by including Falcon (Anthony Mackie), the runaway breakout star of Phase Two. While a heavy-hitter like Black Widow might have dismantled Ant-Man in a heartbeat, pitting the miniature man against Falcon allows us to see how Falcon’s growing in his Avengers training while allowing Mackie some bonus screen time in the role he clearly loves to play. With both of them on Team Cap in Civil War, what are the odds that this scene gets referenced? 
3. “They’re doing some interesting work.” Hang on, Hydra’s still kicking? After being decapitated in Winter Soldier, Age of Ultron, and several times on Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D., Marvel’s long-running baddies get knocked down, but they get up again. (Well, you know what they say about two more heads.) Here it’s Mitchell Carson, played by veteran character actor Martin Donovan. If anyone can exude seediness with a glare, it’s Donovan. We’re almost certainly going to see him and his stolen Pym Particles again at some point, although perhaps not until Ant-Man and the Wasp (due 2018). And what do you know? Carson was once a SHIELD insider too. It’s all connected, forwards and back. 
4. “It’s about damn time.” I didn’t mention this last week, but Age of Ultron only had a midcredits scene, the first Marvel movie not to go full postcredits since The Incredible Hulk. Consequently, it may have felt that Phase Two ended with Thanos donning his empty gauntlet. Nay, I say thee, nay – Ant-Man gestures toward its own sequel by giving Hope Van Dyne her own suit and by teasing us with a glimpse of the immediate future with a Bucky-centric snippet from Civil War. We know that, at some point, Falcon and Cap nab Bucky, fearing how Tony Stark might react. We’ll know how that scene plays out in a fortnight, folks. 
5. “It’s the wrong details.” For as much as Ant-Man is a continuity hound’s delight, featuring cameos from an aging Peggy Carter and nodding in every direction to SHIELD, Hydra, Wasps of future past, and even a Spider-Man tease (“We got a guy who crawls up the walls”), it also adds a chock ton of new faces to the MCU. For one, I’m really hoping we see much more of Luis (Michael Peña) in the Marvel Universe; his nervous ramblings and tangential details make any story worth hearing – hey, could he do DVD commentaries for all the movies? And Darren Cross (Corey Stoll) is right at home as one of Marvel’s well-dressed insidious businessmen, essentially a clean-shaven Obadiah Stane.

There’s so much more to be said about Ant-Man, so be sure to check out my original review. We’ve reached the final film in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, but with one more Wednesday between us and the US premiere of Captain America: Civil War, we’ll take one last peek at the MCU with the underappreciated “One-Shot” short films. Excelsior!