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. 

Ant-Man (2015)

When a movie studio takes on “juggernaut” status in the way that Marvel Studios has, there’s a rubbernecking tendency among the media as they begin to speculate when it will fail, when that first flop will fall. We saw it with Guardians of the Galaxy, which succeeded more than anyone expected (especially for a film with talking trees and raccoons). Now, between the departure of initial director Edgar Wright and the problem of name recognition, Ant-Man had been floated as Marvel’s first failure. The truth is, however, that Ant-Man stumbles through its exposition before ending up as a surprisingly entertaining superhero film.

Scott Lang (Paul Rudd) is a reformed cat burglar who wants to support his daughter, but his criminal past and ex-wife won’t let him. Meanwhile, Hank Pym (Michael Douglas) discovers that his shrinking technology is being appropriated by his protégé Darren Cross (Corey Stoll). Against the advice of his daughter Hope Van Dyne (Evangeline Lilly), Pym tasks Scott with stealing the technology from Cross, offering him the Ant-Man suit to accomplish the heist.

Let’s get the bad news out of the way for those of us true believers who love these movies – Ant-Man is a little bit clunky, especially in the exposition department. There’s a very funny line in the trailers – slightly different in the finished film – where Hank Pym tells Scott, “I need you to break into a place and steal some stuff.” The thing about Ant-Man is that the first twenty minutes or so is exactly like that, with characters very directly expressing their motivations, desires, and plot arcs. Scott’s relationship with his daughter could have been somewhat poignant, but every scene he’s in involves him telling someone else how much he cares for his daughter before being reminded that he has a criminal record. It’s very on-the-nose screenwriting that distracts from the Marvel emphasis on character; compare, for example, to Iron Man and the way it introduced Tony Stark by showing him in his natural habitat rather than telling us, “Tony, you’re irresponsible.”

Having said that, with a first act that feels very perfunctory, once Ant-Man gets going it’s a much more successful film. It manages to walk that line between acknowledging how absurd the concept is and just running with it, without feeling parodic or naïve. It’s aware of the innate absurdity of a superhero whose power is talking to ants, but at the same time it demonstrates just how much can be done with that power. There are several moments in the film where I said to myself, “Oh, I hadn’t thought of that,” moments that demonstrate the creativity of the writers and the way in which they’ve taken the concept seriously without being too serious about it.

A large part of the film’s attitude comes from Rudd’s naturalism in the role; for me, he’s always been the member of the Judd Apatow “Frat Pack” who can step back from the material and wink at it without compromising the integrity of his performance, and he brings that grounded irony to Scott Lang. At the other end of the spectrum, it is an absolute delight to see Michael Douglas in the Marvel Cinematic Universe. I’ve said before that he’s one of those actors who is watchable no matter what he’s doing. In the role of the mentor – Marvel’s first “legacy” character – Douglas shines as someone crippled by loss and haunted by his past. Lilly, for those who haven’t seen her since Lost, is also quite compelling as Hope, the kind of character of which we just can’t wait to see more, and thank heavens we’ll almost certainly see her in a film down the road, because Hope has the potential to be a breakout star of the MCU – spirited, heroic, and unique (there isn’t really a comparison character, fortunately).

The thing that makes Ant-Man a real success, aside from the inevitable tie-in aspects (including cameos from Howard Stark, Peggy Carter, and one other name I won’t spoil - though for God's sake, people, stay through the credits!), is its adherence to the formula of the heist film. Marvel’s been pretty good with this lately, giving us a 70s spy film with Captain America: The Winter Soldier and a space opera with Guardians of the Galaxy, so the genre play here keeps the superhero genre from growing stale (really, how many times can one replicate the structure of Superman before wearing it thin?). Think of it like Ocean’s Eleven if Danny Ocean could shrink. And the rousing score by Christophe Beck helps that atmosphere work for the audience.

I went into Ant-Man expecting it to be a passable superhero venture, one of a dozen generic entries, but the film won over the cynic in me fairly rapidly and convinced me it had something to offer – a return to form of sorts, something akin to Iron Man with its emphasis on corporate espionage rather than saving the world. It’s not as strong a film as Iron Man, but it’s no less entertaining than at least half of what Marvel has put out in the last decade.

Ant-Man is rated PG-13 for “sci-fi action violence.” There is a fair amount of running, jumping, and punching, done at an atomic level so we only see full-size people recoiling from being hit by Ant-Man. There’s also the usual amount of peril and menace from the principal antagonist.

Year One (2009)

How the mighty have fallen. I watched Year One out of fidelity to Michael Cera and writer/director Harold Ramis, and I'm really sorry that I did.

In a riff of sorts on Mel Brooks's History of the World, Part I, Year One follows two tribal villagers - Zed (Jack Black) and Oh (Cera) - on a walking tour of the Old Testament after they eat from the tree of knowledge of good and evil, an action that results in their exile from the village. After meeting Cain and Abel (David Cross and Paul Rudd) and a brush with circumcision-happy Abraham and his son Isaac (Hank Azaria and Christopher "McLovin" Mintz-Plasse), the two wind up in Sodom & Gomorrah, trying to save the two caveladies they're sweet on.

Among the more distracting and ultimately distasteful aspects of the film is that it plays fast and loose with historical and textual accuracy. The film has us believe that cavemen, Israelites, Egyptians, and Romans existed at the same time, though any student in a 100-level history survey knows better. More problematic is the film's overreliance on established Old Testament narratives, which it disregards in favor of a vignette-style approach in which our cavepeople happen upon notable scenes. Yet Year One suggests that the murder of Abel (Genesis 4), the sacrifice of Isaac (Genesis 22), and the impending destruction of Sodom & Gomorrah (Genesis 19) all occurred within a few weeks of each other - an implication that diverts one's attention from the action on screen. The worst offense on this count is that Sodom & Gomorrah are saved at the end of the film, which is disappointing considering a special effects piece involving Michael Bay-style explosions might have redeemed at least a fraction of the movie for me.

Not that there's much action to watch. Black and Cera move from scene to scene without doing much; they make a few crude sexual jokes before some heavyhanded expositional dialogue signals a coming change of scenery. Black is perfectly cast as a caveman - just not this caveman; as a supposed "chosen one," Zed is responsible for enlightening civilization and ushering in a new era for mankind. This from a guy who in the next breath drops the ball on a fart joke? I've never understood Hollywood's love affair with Black (save for what I thought was a deent supporting role in Tropic Thunder), and Year One solidifies that. Similarly, Cera's underused here, though I doubt he would have done much more with Oh if he weren't; Cera plays the same socially awkward mumbler he always does, and while he's decent at this character type, his delivery trumps the poor dialogue he receives.

That's the biggest problem with Year One - it's a Harold Ramis film. The man who brought us Animal House, Ghostbusters, and Groundhog Day is responsible for this stinker. Knowing that Ramis is capable of so much more than this - cognizant of the potential that's being squandered in this movie - is almost as painful as sitting through the whole movie. As comedy scripts go, this is one of the unfunniest I've ever seen; the acting is weak, the jokes are humorless (even and especially when the film descends to the level of excrement jokes), and the ending fizzles out. Indeed, the only joy one can derive from this experience is celebrity spotting; for reasons I've yet to comprehend, Year One is populated with A-list stars slumming for a paycheck (either that or they simply want to say they were in a Harold Ramis movie). I felt most sorry for Oliver Platt, who's trapped in gaudy robes and one-note jokes about homosexuality; similar pathos goes out to Olivia Wilde, whose nascent career now has a dark smear on it.

Year One is also the name of one of my favorite Batman storylines. DC Comics followed up the popular storyline with Year Two and Year Three, though Harold Ramis would do better to move on and pretend that Year One never happened.
Year One is rated PG-13 "for crude and sexual content throughout, brief strong language and comic violence." The characters talk about sex and "laying with" in almost every scene, sometimes quite crudely; F-bombs crop up on occcasion, and there are a few goofy sword/fistfights that are as enjoyable as they are gory, which is to say not at all.

Anchorman: The Legend of Ron Burgundy (2004)

I believe Anchorman has reached a place for (at the very least) my generation at which it can be regarded as a comedy classic, and so - at the risk of redundancy - I submit for your approval my glowing review of the film that really made Will Ferrell a movie star.

Ferrell plays Ron Burgundy, top newsman in San Diego and leader of the Channel 4 News Team; loyal sidekicks include boisterous Champ Kind (David Koechner) on sports, ladies' man Brian Fantana (Paul Rudd) on features, and 48-point IQ Brick Tamland (Steve Carell) on weather. The "man's world" of the 1970s is rocked when Channel 4 adds Veronica Corningstone (Christina Applegate) as the industry's first female anchor; soon, Ron and Veronica find themselves alternating between bouts of lovemaking and (somewhat un)professional rivalry.

In a way, I believe that Anchorman came at a time that redefined the American comedy; coupled with movies like Wedding Crashers and Dodgeball - note the shared cast members in all these - Anchorman introduced to audiences the new face of comedy, both personally (with new cast who hadn't really done comedy on film before) and metaphorically (in terms of the kinds of laughs to be elicited). Anchorman represents a slip in the "mugging for laughs" movement I associate with people like David Spade and Norm MacDonald, who pause or crack grins after saying or doing something funny so that the audience has time to laugh before the movie continues on; here, though, the laughs continue on more like a rolling barrel down a hill than down a staircase - like a snowball as distinct from a jumping bean.

This success is due in large part to first-time director Adam McKay, who knows how to time a lot of the jokes and doesn't prolong any scene beyond its lifespan. Exactly the opposite - McKay has a keen sense for timing, knowing exactly how long a scene needs to be while remaining funny. Best example? The news team rumble that occurs halfway through the film. It begins with a few modest giggles, particularly because of the perfectly overdrawn rival anchor Wes Mantooth (Vince Vaughn). Soon, though, it escalates into the territory of the absolutely ludicrous, with Mexican newsmen joining the fight as a flaming man and a brandished trident amp up the comedy until the shot quick-cuts away from the fight to a post-game pep talk in Ron Burgundy's office, all paced perfectly. One wonders if the Coen Brothers were inspired by this cut when crafting the J.K. Simmons scenes in Burn After Reading (also a modern comedy classic).

But more credit belongs to all the performers, who display a deft capacity to create fully fleshed-out characters with a funny bone the size of Nebraska. Ferrell is in front and deservedly so, but his supporting cast shines brighter if only because there are just so many of them. Rudd, Koechner, and Applegate are fine supporting characters, subtly revealing more about their characters as the film progresses. But it's Carell who steals the show in a way that all the best comedic supporting actors can; Brick Tamland's the one who gets quoted the most by fans, if only for his brilliantly subdued "I love lamp" and his portrayal of a borderline-retarded weatherman whose perpetual disorientation only gets funnier and never feels like a broken record. Anchorman is littered with bit players like Vaughn, Fred Willard, Jack Black, Danny Trejo, and Seth Rogen who do fine work here even though they're not given very much screen time at all. Small doses, especially when it comes to perfect comedic timing, aren't always a bad thing.

What I like best about Anchorman, though, is the brand of humor the film employs, emphasizing personality over action, situation over punchline. Sure, it's funny to see Ron and Veronica throw typewriters at each other, but what's funnier about this scene is the clash of personalities at stake and the fact that each character believes themselves superior to the other. I've lambasted films for being all anticipation and no bang, but Anchorman handles anticipation in a bold new way; by introducing characters who are already funny, we can't help but laugh when we see these characters, even if they're not doing anything funny. Brick Tamland is funny even when he's not putting marshmallow fluff into a toaster, precisely because he's the kind of character who puts marshmallow fluff into a toaster. Ron Burgundy is funny not because of what he says or does, but he's funny purely on the virtue of being Ron Burgundy. Simply put, the movie earns all of its laughs.

In short, I cannot fathom any serious moviegoer, especially one who loves comedies, who has not seen this movie. Anchorman - along with its protagonist, Ron Burgundy - truly is legendary.
Anchorman: The Legend of Ron Burgundy comes in two varieties - one of which is rated PG-13 "for sexual humor, language and comic violence." The dialogue is raunchy but not distractingly so, although it is incredibly sexist. One key F-bomb and a few lesser profanities (most of them excremental in nature) appear, as does a ludicrous fight scene played for laughs. An unrated version is only marginally different, with slightly more F-bombs and a bit more sexual dialogue, as well as more excremental material.