Review: Marvel’s “Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania”
Ant-Man is that Marvel franchise that keeps coming out of nowhere and hitting it out of the park. At least, it was until Quantumania came to screens on February 17, 2023. This isn’t to say that the film is bad, which many have been claiming, but rather, that it is extremely underwhelming. Most of the lovably quirky supporting cast has been shed in favor of bland, one-off CGI creatures and new human-esque characters that are largely only there to pop the audience, such as Bill Murray’s much-publicized cameo that comes across as forced and ultimately falls flat. And that, in many ways, is emblematic of the film as a whole. It is grand and epic in scope, with a great presentation (mostly), but the story falters, almost from the very beginning, and the final product is just rather limp, especially in comparison to the earlier installments.
The biggest problem with Quantumania is a lack of excitement. Oh, there is spectacle aplenty. There are bright colors, hole-obsessed gelatinous monsters, laser guns, and all the shrinking and super-sizing a fan could ask for. But, for all the earnest effort to provide action, it is all smoke and mirrors. There is no meat on the bone of this story, and as a result everything is just rote. Things don’t seem to be happening in the film because the story builds to the specific events, but rather because they need to happen. It’s like the writers thought “oh, we need a villain reveal here,” so they reach into their bag of unused characters, find Darren Cross/Yellowjacket, accidentally find M.O.D.O.K. as well, throw up their hands and shout, “What the hell! Let’s do it!” And again, this isn’t saying that the inclusion of M.O.D.O.K. is bad (he’s actually one of the more entertaining aspects of the movie) but that it is shoehorned in because the creative team wanted a callback to the earlier films and they wanted to bring in this fun character. It’s spectacle and schtick with no substance.
What’s worse is, every effort is being made to bulk up the story and establish some meaning for the events. But the attempts are so ham-fisted that instead of creating a nuanced story that flows naturally and builds over the course of the film, they create a tonally confused mess. It’s a veritable yo-yo of emotion, with things bouncing between melodrama and sophomoric humor on a dime with no real rhyme or reason. One moment, Cassie Lang is fighting M.O.D.O.K. because she needs to get to her father to help him because she’s supposedly terrified of losing him again, and the next she’s stopping in her tracks the lecture the villain about being a dick. It doesn’t make sense for this to happen, beyond Marvel needing to hit their mandated joke-per-minute quota. Even when they try to add some emotionality to the proceedings, such as with Cassie being disappointed in Scott for, essentially, giving up the hero gig after Endgame and looking out for himself, they drop it and never circle back because there is another set piece to get to.
The thing that made the Ant-Man franchise work so well was the small-scale approach and focus on the human element. The character of Scott Lang, in many ways, stood in for the audience. He really is just a regular guy getting thrust into issues that are ridiculously out of his league. On the flip side, he’s an out-of-work ex-con struggling to regain the family he lost because of his mistakes. There was a level of authenticity that came across that was very different from the usual Marvel fare. The films were largely successful because the were full of heart, relished the quirky side of the characters and told different kinds of stories where sentiment was the overall point, even if they doggedly adhered to the proven MCU formula.
But Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania essentially throws that all away in an attempt to tell a bombastic, balls-to-the wall thrill fest akin to Spider-Man: No Way Home, but that just isn’t what this franchise does, and in so doing, the film sacrificed the quality of the story. Ant-Man and Ant-Man and the Wasp are both rollicking action-comedies. They keep the audience on the edge of their seats with intense set pieces mixed with thoughtful, heartfelt stories that the audience can sympathize with. The focus was on family, with a healthy mix of weird action and humor. But Quantumania misses out on that nuance and comes across as the writer’s room chucking everything they had at the wall and praying that something resembling a coherent flick sticks. And white the film isn’t an utter mess, it neither lives up to the expectations that had been heaped upon it nor the potential it had to be something amazing. Rather, it’s passable. And in a franchise that was able to pull of films with the epic grandeur of Avengers: Endgame, passable, while sometimes necessary, is nonetheless a big disappointment.
