Film Review: Ant-Man and the Wasp - Quantumania

Spoilers ahoy

I suppose I could shock a few people by stating that I didn't find this film to be as bad as I expected. It's no classic by any stretch of imagination, but it wasn't as dreadful as some people thought. Yes, there's a awful amount in it to want to run away from, but in the grand scheme of things I don't think it deserves a 6.3 rating on IMDB.

I suppose the first thing you notice is what a CGIgasm it is; a proper COVID film, probably shot in a small studio with lots of green screens. You think there's going to be a lot going on but in reality the superfluous supporting characters are just that, superfluous and irrelevant for most of the film. It's got a Star Wars vibe about it but it also feels like it's trying to replicate elements from Thor: Ragnarok but ultimately, as a number of people have pointed out, absolutely nothing happens.

The funny thing is the opening ten minutes of Scott and co at home had a good feel about it; there was some nice dialogue and the jokes were as Ant-Man corny as ever, but it's Janet's mystery story that pervades this film from almost the opening scene (well, the opening scene is in the Quantum Realm so that's a bit obvious) and the fact that until about an hour in she hasn't bothered to tell anyone about the potential threat to existence she left trapped there or all the people she got to know and have 'interactions' with. When they find themselves sucked into that world, it's she who navigates around the realm with ease, while her daughter Hope looks like she's too busy scanning the script to see if she has any viable part to play and husband Hank is just freaked out by the strange appearances of the indigenous species. As these three look for Scott and Cassie, they're meeting some of other locals and drinking the ooze (and the someone out wondering why I likened John Carter to this film will now know why).

I kept wondering why Bill Murray was in it and what the exchange added to the film at all, but the weird thing is while there seems to be a healthy supporting cast, there's fewer than 10 actors with more than one line; four of them have little or no bearing on the story. One of those actors with a lot to say is Corey Stoll as MODOK, the subject of much derision on the interwebs and understandably so. The character was played as a bit of a joke with laughably poor dialogue - although 'It's never too late to stop being a dick' was quite funny - and his CGI wouldn't have looked out of place in Richard Donner's 1978 Superman. It also didn't quite gel with this concept of Kang being this all-powerful despot ruling the QR; why would he have this grinning half-wit as his #2? Why didn't the people who made this film look at the end result and think, 'nope, that's not good enough for a paying audience'. They could have cut 10 minutes from the film and just had MODOK as this masked killing machine. I understand the desire to tie everything into the MCU continuity, but I felt MODOK being Derek from the first film - Yellowjacket - was unnecessary, pointless and misjudged. 

Oddly enough 'misjudged' is a good word to describe the MCU and its new association with comedy. The films always had some humour in them, but over the last few years that humour has become a comedic theme that felt out of place, such as in Thor: Love & Thunder. Jokes are one thing, but sometimes things become redundant or not needed. The Ant-Man franchise has embraced the lighter side of the MCU and it's been a welcome change, but without familiar settings and humorous tropes Quantumania just becomes another superhero film with bad jokes.

So... the elephant in the room is our villain Jonathan Majors, currently on bail having been charged with assault against a female in NYC. It would be fair to say the entire immediate future of the MCU is dependent on a positive outcome for the actor, but is he any good? Well... he's different. 

I'm not convinced Majors is that good an actor or whether Kang is the right villain. It gives Marvel a lot of scope for future films, but given they're likely to be reducing their film output rather than increasing it, the idea of a decade long Kang story begins to look like a rabbit hole they should never have looked down. However, if Ant-Man can beat Kang as easily as he does then I fear for the future of the MCU film franchise. He's obviously insane and there was at least two occasions during the film where he could have done what he wanted but dithered around pontificating and lost any advantage; plus he's no Thanos and frankly we've seen more threatening threats in other films that we might like to see again but haven't...

Plus, the post-credit scenes both featured Majors; the first was a massive crowd of millions of Kangs, while the second looked like a sneak peak of the next season of Loki, so they're still heavily invested in the future of this character. I suppose it's possible that they could easily have different looking Kangs, even go back and change the faces of many of the million Kangs, but in the current climate we have regarding this kind of thing I feel as though investing my time and interest in this villain isn't a wise move and I probably won't be the only person who feels that way.

Overall, I went in with less than zero expectations and I almost enjoyed it. It could have easily been a one-hour TV special because there is something extremely superficial about it; while presenting and promoting it as the start of the latest Phase feels like an awful con to me given that while it is absolutely an accurate phrase, you probably don't have to watch it to be any further ahead in the grand scheme of things. I like Paul Rudd, but I'm not convinced he makes a great leading man; I've never understood the appeal of Evangeline Lily and Kathryn Newton as Cassie is very annoying and feels like she's on screen longer than she is.

Oh and this week's deus ex machina are, of course, ants, because they often are. 

Next up Guardians of the Galaxy Volume 3 which is in cinemas in less than two weeks. What I will say is I've really been looking forward to that film, despite not liking either of the first two, because the trailers build it up to be something special. The trailers for Quantmania are so expertly done that many of the clips used ended up being out of context to how they would be used, this is filling me with more than a little dread about the GotGv3 film now.

[Something just struck me while editing the last couple of paragraphs; they feel ... bitty or like I could do them better or that I maybe put a load of unrelated sentences into one paragraph to avoid carriage breaks. I think it's the best analogy I kind think of for Quantumania; it's doesn't feel like a complete item and they tried to cram nothing into an hour and fifty minutes.]