Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania

Our Review

The slump’s textbook. Quantumania sends the whole Ant-Man family into the quantum realm, a greenscreen city of bobble headed creatures and bioluminescent rocks, and spends two hours there without a single location that feels touchable. The charm of the first two films was their scale comedy, the kitchen fights, the toy box battles. This one abandons scale entirely for a Star Wars cantina pastiche, and the loss is fatal.

Paul Rudd stays game, Michael Douglas gets one good monologue about his time down there, and Kathryn Newton takes over as Cassie with nothing to play but earnestness. Michelle Pfeiffer and Evangeline Lilly are reduced to running and shooting. Bill Murray appears for a scene and evaporates. MODOK, a beloved weirdo of the comics, debuts as a giant floating head played entirely for pity laughs, and it hurts to watch.

The one thing the movie had to do was sell Kang. Jonathan Majors plays the time warlord as a contained fury, and two scenes, the interrogation of an insect and the quiet threat to Scott about his daughter, show the menace that made him the franchise’s bet. The rest of the film buries him in action noise, and the ending where he is simply punched into a engine feels like a loss by default.

Our score: 4/10, and the worst reviewed Marvel entry of its era for reasons that are all on screen.