Score: 3 / 5
In the time since Endgame, Scott Lang (Paul Rudd) and Hope van Dyne (Evangeline Lilly) have developed a happy little life together, and his memoir is modestly successful. Scott's teenage daughter Cassie (now played by Kathryn Newton) has become a political activist, which occasionally causes tension with her former thief of a father. She's been working secretly on a project to establish contact with the Quantum Realm, a place of noted existential danger in the previous films where the original Wasp, Janet van Dyne (Michelle Pfeiffer), had been trapped for many years. Janet tries to shut it down, but too late: the intergenerational family is pulled into the Quantum Realm and, as you may have guessed from the title, mayhem ensues.
The Ant-Man series has always held an odd place in the MCU; few people would say these are their favorites or even that the heroes themselves rank among their favorites, but Peyton Reed's offbeat and endlessly clever humor, tied with the immense likability of the cast, certainly make them lovely and unique entries in the franchise. Unfortunately, I think those qualities have just about exhausted themselves. Quantumania is, by comparison, a hot mess of CGI and annoyingly forced plot points meant to spark interest in yet another new phase of MCU storytelling. Though it's almost funny that this film puts Ant-Man and his compatriots into the smallest size they've ever been, it's easily the most eye-popping, sprawling, and surely expensive of his movies to date. It's also the least funny of them, which makes it all ring a bit too hollow for my taste.
What it lacks in humor and originality, Quantumania more than makes up for in visual flair. Reed and his team turn the Quantum Realm, which we've briefly explored in kaleidoscopic montages before, into a wholly fanciful universe unto itself. Psychedelic colors and shapes and patterns dazzle our eyes constantly in this film, and more than once I found myself gazing into the background art rather than tending to the characters and plot. It's like the creators dropped acid before designing the world, using Avatar's Pandora and Disney's Fantasia as references. While I could attempt to recall specifics of plot, I'd rather leave those bits to you to experience, because ultimately I doubt they matter much anyway, at least not yet.
Instead, I'll just trill on about other things, starting with the characters. The ones we already know and love are fine doing what they do, although Pfeiffer finally gets some solid screen time and a few scenes to really chew, while Michael Douglas all but twiddles his thumbs in a film where he's clearly utterly lost. Lilly is all but wasted, though Newton stakes a bold claim for her iteration of Cassie. A host of new characters is revealed in the Quantum Realm, although we're barely given enough time to appreciate -- much less remember -- them. There's a pink gelatinous creature who wishes more than anything to possess orifices like humans, a telepath who always hears the wacky, naughty thoughts of others, and even Bill Murray as a buffoonish local governor with a salacious history with Janet. It's all cute but ephemeral, only really existing to serve the weirdness of this new environment and the impending threat of a new Big Bad.
Enter Kang, ruler of the Quantum Realm, who apparently rose to power after Janet left previously. The film has to work overtime to explain their history together and why Janet never mentioned him before. He's a bit of a genocidal madman, hoping to conquer and destroy other timelines and alternate parts of the multiverse. He's also apparently one of many variants, and the one depicted in this film had been exiled by the others for mysterious reasons. Thankfully, all are played by Jonathan Majors, who is always excellent, though I hope future entries featuring Kang give him meatier material; here, he's broadly written and vaguely dangerous. More specificity -- like the kind Majors gives -- will help Kang feel like a real character and less of an idea. His greatest threat is as much a cliche as anything in this film: he threatens to murder Cassie and make Scott experience it infinitely if Scott doesn't successfully steal a certain power core (which inherently means nothing more than being the MacGuffin of this movie). It's not a great start for a character meant to lord over an entire phase of what is now a multimedia series.
Much as Ant-Man himself, his movies tend to not quite take themselves super seriously. Which is fine until it isn't, and this time it's hard to really care much about Kang or anything else because it's just not the kind of movie, tonally, to take any emotional or thematic risks. He's a second-tier superhero, and while this movie looks like a Marvel fever dream on drugs, thanks to cinematographer Bill Pope of The Matrix, several Sam Raimi and Edgar Wright movies, and Shang-Chi, and the visual artists, I couldn't quite shake the feeling that Pope seemed determined to disguise his own input. After all, how could a movie like this really be said to have a cinematographer of artistic integrity when every shot is so clearly pre-visualized to death by the effects artists and producers? I earnestly hope this isn't indicative of the aesthetic direction of the MCU's newest phase.
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