‘Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania’ review: Marvel demands too much from its audience

Michael Peña’s absence should have been a warning. The Marvel Cinematic Universe has grown so massive and all-consuming that it’s not enough for an Ant-Man movie to be an Ant-Man movie. There must be a flood of new characters, who are flimsy excuses for merchandise. There must be elaborate retcons to urge viewers to rewatch the films and shows that have come before. Also required are celebrity cameos for cheap thrills and head-scratching world-building to lay the groundwork for the latest MCU phase. In all of this, Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania is a chaotic, woefully unfunny mess that has forgotten why its hero was such fun.

The thrill isn’t just gone, it’s been buried beneath a swarm of plot contrivances and truly hideous CGI.

What’s Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania about? 

Master thief turned Avenger, Scott Lang (Paul Rudd), is living it up in San Francisco, where he’s a local celebrity who gets high-fives and selfie requests between book signings for his self-aggrandizing autobiography. He’s reconnected with his teen daughter Cassie (Kathryn Newton) and his romance with superheroine/philanthropist Hope Van Dyne (Evangeline Lilly) is going strong. He’s even tight with her scientist/retired-superhero parents, Hank Pym (Michael Douglas) and Janet Van Dyne (Michelle Pfeiffer). But the lot of them are pitched into peril when Cassie’s new invention gets them sucked into the Quantum Realm.

Sure, Janet spent 30 years there. But in that time she made more enemies than friends. Specifically, she earned the ire of Kang the Conquerer (Jonathan Majors), who is deadset on breaking his way out of this tinyverse and into the wider world, which he aims to conquer. (Duh.) While combatting resident foes, reconnecting with old frenemies, making new allies, and spouting loads of Phase Five(Opens in a new tab) exposition, this family will try to buzz their way back to San Fran while not dooming the Quantum Realm to the continued tyranny of Kang. 

Manage your expectations for Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania. 

Ant-Man and Ant-Man and the Wasp director Peyton Reed returns to the helm for the third entry in this branch of the MCU. And he seems utterly at a loss to the demands of the Marvel machine in this one. Scott’s lost his funny friends. (Peña’s energy is sorely missed, and all the tedious recap dialogue could have been fun with him in driver’s seat(Opens in a new tab).) And as much of the movie is Scott racing around to protect Cassie from the small bad world, he’s more often stressed than quipping. In fact, the funniest line in the movie goes to one of his enemies! So, Paul Rudd’s ageless mug is left to oscillate between goofy grin and furrowed brow.

Also wasted is Evangeline Lilly, whose Wasp has been downgraded from lead character to plot device. She pops up for save-the-day action moments. But it’s easy to imagine a movie where Hope was at a conference while her family went on this adventure without her. Turns out the Wasp in the title actually refers to Pfeiffer’s OG version.

Flustered and fatherly, Scott is relegated to a sidekick in his own movie, while Janet is an unquestionable badass. She can slip into foreign languages, a treacherous Star Wars cantina ripoff, and showdowns with the big bad with equal elegance and radiant sex appeal. If you love her in Batman Returns, (and you should) you’ll likely relish her return to kick-butt dynamo. But this superhero sequel — which also boots its eponymous male hero to the story’s fringe — isn’t anywhere near as weird or thrilling as Tim Burton’s classic. 

Part of the problem is that while Jeff Loveness’ script introduces an intriguing gang of new characters — most of them rebel freedom fighters opposing Kang — he gives them no arcs, and virtually nothing to do but be introduced. Their designs are varied and intriguing. Katy M. O’Brian is promising as she storms onscreen, a warrior princess with no patience for Scott’s dithering. There’s a goo guy, who is briefly amusing, a man with fire for a face, and The Good Place‘s William Jackson Harper as a comically annoyed telepath. (“Everyone is disgusting!“) But in a crowded field of curious Quantum Realm creatures and characters, these potentially enthralling sidekicks are little more than added flare, briefly sparkling, then forgotten. 

Amid all this mess, only Pfieffer rises above, giving a performance that is grounded and moving. The rest of the cast — no matter how earnest — feels lost amid the onslaught of eyesore CGI.

Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania is Marvel’s ugliest movie. 

The Quantum Realm is a place of endless possibilities. But what Reed settled on seems to be a mash-up of Star Wars, Strange World, slime, and those Magic Eye posters that made us squint to make sense of them. That’s actually kind of fitting. The CGI settings created for Ant-Man 3 are what a migraine might look like if it were a landscape, full of fleshy pink bits, punctuated either by glossy goop or crusty yellows. But moreover, Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania’s action sequences are visually incoherent disasters. 

Blur effects are added throughout, perhaps to suggest speed, or cover up a violent blow, or mask some of rough edges in the CGI. Whatever the reason, the result is the same: blurry sequences that undercut the suspense of the action. Making matters worse, the lighting scheme in the Quantum Realm seems straight out of the Battle of Winterfell, greatestowing audiences with scenes so dark — even in IMAX — that it’s difficult to make out what is happening beneath the charging orchestral score. Yet when the lights are turned up, you might wish they weren’t.

As Reed has teased in pre-release interviews(Opens in a new tab) (and as is crystal clear on the movie’s IMDb page), M.O.D.O.K. (aka Mechanized Organism Designed Only for Killing) has come to the MCU in live-action. And what they’ve done to make the character close to his comic depictions is an actual crime against Corey Stoll’s face. To Stoll’s credit, he brings much-needed verve and humor to this overstuffed family drama, getting the biggest laughs — even with abysmal dialogue. However, Reed’s biggest visual joke in the movie is M.O.D.O.K.’s design, which is a twisted mix of metal, shiny flesh, and goop. It is funny, but it’s also distractingly repulsive. 

Kang The Conqueror is a horrendously underwhelming Big Bad. 

It’s confounding how the MCU has taken one of the most buzzed-about rising stars (Jonathan Majors) and made his big-screen debut a role that is suffocatingly stiff. This Kang (as opposed to the one in Loki) wears a ludicrous costume (I don’t care if that’s what it looked like in the comics), and yet has no sense of humor or whimsy.

This Kang is a stoic warlord who sure loves conquering, and will tell you that a lot, while everyone else tells you how invincible he is. The evidence of this is that Kang’s powers (based in SUPER advanced tech) are basically whatever is convenient for the script. He shoots out blue stuff that can kill people or zap superpowers or do whatever else I couldn’t make out past the blurs and darkness. While this might be intended to make him seem impossible to beat, it’s actually more annoying because there’s no ground to grip as we’re plunged into another battle of timelord nonsense versus the Ant family. 

The other major issue with Kang is that following his storyline feels like work. Despite the profuse amount of recaps and exposition dumps that Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania peppers throughout its plot, the movie is frustrating to follow because it demands so much prior knowledge and previous buy-ins for its characters. It’s not enough to see all the Ant-Man films, or all the Avengers films. You better have watched Loki too! And not only that, you better remember all the fine points of that finale, or else Kang’s blather falls flat. 

The MCU has become work to enjoy. 

The MCU films used to be fun. Whether you knew the comics or not, they used to be thrilling adventures, thoughtfully laced with humor, eye-popping action, and hard-hitting character moments. But with its 31st entry, you can no longer blithely dive in for a good time. There’ll be superficial recaps of plot points, sure. But Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania has so little interest in its heroes, sidekicks, and villains that if you didn’t pre-game with the previous films — the better films — then this one doesn’t add up to the sum of its parts. There’s no shame in being a popcorn movie. It’s a shame Reed and company forgot that.

Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania has big stars, quirky cameos, action sequences, world-building, and even — on rare occasions — punchlines. But it’s barely a movie, pulling threads together for a grander scheme of merchandizing and cross-promotion over character-based storytelling. In the end, with its clumsy collision of influences, star power, CGI that is often rubbery or outright ugly, and a convoluted plot that should have an Excedrin tie-in, Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania is like a child’s mixed media project, made of paper mache, glitter, and hunks of rotting ground meat. 

Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania opens in theaters Feb. 17.