Ant-Man & The Wasp: Quantumania ★★★
Peyton Reed
Starring Paul Rudd, Evangeline Lily, Jonathan Majors, Michelle Pfeiffer, Michael Douglas, Kathryn Newton
Finally a big solo adventure for Marvel’s littlest hero. Quantumania delivers a kid-friendly whimsical Ant-Man tale more bombastic than its predecessors in a universe where Marvel films are beginning to feel small.
Content with being out of the superhero game, Scott Lang (Paul Rudd) and his family are literally sucked back into the microscopic world of the Quantum Realm with the simple goal of trying to escape, all the while being pursued by the villainous Kang the Conqueror (Jonathan Majors) and his faceless army as he looks to return to our world for ravenous revenge.
It’s about as minimal of a plot as it gets (pun intended), but the thing to take away is the true purpose of the film - to set up the next big bad.
Majors as Kang is a true delight. The film spends half its run time teasing his arrival which makes him all the more imposing when he’s finally on screen. Each flicker or rage and nuance in his performance adds to the resume of his ‘Avengers villain’ job application, until no one can really turn him down. I’ve wanted to see Kang get the MCU treatment for a long time and it’s good to see that his portrayal has escaped the dreaded problem plagued by many instalments of the series.
Before talking about everybody else, it’s worth noting that this movie is complete and utter bonkers. The cast are either on board with this or not and like them, if you want to have a good time you have to just go with it. Paul Rudd tonally holds the movie together with enough wit and sarcasm to establish both the gravity and absurdity of the situation. The same cannot be said for veteran actor Michael Douglas who looks like he has been driven insane in this CGI heavy landscape with a kids menu as a movie script.
This hypothesis pretty much sums up how you the viewer are going to traverse Quantumania. It doesn’t suffer from a tonal imbalance as much as Thor: Love and Thunder or Guardians of the Galaxy: Vol 2 did for me but all signs from the eclectic creature designs to the corny dialogue point this to being ‘one for the kids’.
But then again, Ant-Man was never this magnitudal epic that needed to be presented as such and in each instalment of his trilogy, poking fun at how ridiculous a shrinking hero can be ticked all the boxes.
It’s probably the most marmite Marvel film you’ll ever see, but that doesn’t mean it’s neither good or bad. If the only thing Quantuamania delivered on is to establish the looming threat of Kang for our big ensemble piece, then it did just that and I can’t wait to see what they do with him next.
Ant-Man & The Wasp: Quantumania available in UK cinemas now