Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania

Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania

The “Ant-Man” movies’ unsaid slogan is “think small” which has caused it to be different from the rest of the Marvel Cinematic Universe that leans towards massive. “Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania” takes that idea and shrinks Ant-Man/Scott Lange (Paul Rudd) and other major characters down to a subatomic size ten minutes into the movie, sending them to the Quantum Realm James Cameron’s Pandora reimagined as the cover of a 1970s jazz fusion album and keeps them there for the entire film while they fight an exiled supervillain named Kang (Jonathan Majors). This is both the biggest and smallest Ant-Man film yet, which is a neat trick.

Should you see it? Not really. The middle hour is fun in that patented breezy “Ant-Man” way; returning director Peyton Reed and screenwriter Jeff Loveness let the characters wander around in this psychedelic sci-fi cartoon version of those jungles in 1930s serials where some clueless Western explorer would misinterpret a gesture and anger a local tribe, or get dunked in a river by an elephant, or be grossed out by snake meat until they had a bite and realized it tasted kinda like chicken.

Here, the tribe includes a guy with a flashlight for a head, one with transparent gelatinous body who’s obsessed with how many “holes” humans have (the comedic peak of Rudd’s performance is when Scott counts on his fingers), and a telepath (William Jackson Harper) who’s cursed to constantly hear other people’s bizarre thoughts or filthy thoughts or both at once. Instead of elephants, we have houses that look as if Fred Flintstone’s home mated with the Pillsbury Dough Boy; they’re alive, can walk around on their stumpy legs, defend themselves in war. There are gelatinous bugs and other critters, shrubs and trees modeled on fungi and lichens; a mitochondrial thing scaled like Godzilla.

They all seem to be modeled on photos of “small worlds” at various magnification levels; that the designers have grouped these microscopic/subatomic things because they’re “small” is part of the fun. It’s what a kid throws together for a science fair, hoping sheer charm will compensate for lack of actual science content.

Too bad that, for all its amusing jokes, the world onscreen mostly looks like a Marvel screen-saver: Bill Pope, who shot the “Matrix” films and multiple Sam Raimi and Edgar Wright movies, is the cinematographer here (though you wouldn’t know it); there’s not much for a cinematographer (or director even Ryan Coogler has seemed tamped down by Marvel) to do to show individual personality on these projects when so much of the running time is pre-visualized by effects companies; and when Marvel studios boss Kevin Feige, who seems determined to keep art to a minimum lest it gum up the content machine, wields an aesthetic veto pen.

When it comes to Kang, he is what genre buffs call a “ret-con.” In this movie, the filmmakers have him be a fearsome all-powerful villain (essentially Thanos in a new wrapper: a genocidal madman) and introduced so that he can quickly be positioned as the Big Bad for the next Avengers team-up. But they also have to somehow explain why Janet van Dyne (Michelle Pfeiffer), former wife of original Ant-Man Hank Pym (Michael Douglas), who was stuck in the Quantum Realm for 30 years, never mentioned Kang to anyone.

The answer is not convincing, although Pfeiffer does her darnedest. But this is a comic-book movie, so you just have to go with it. At least Pfeiffer has plenty to do here in terms of pushing the plot forward and papering over cracks in the storytelling. Poor Hope, though aka The Wasp (Evangeline Lilly) just kind of seems to be there. She’s present and accounted for, but doesn’t make much of an impression.

(Narratively speaking, she’s been eclipsed by Cassie: The last one was more the Pyms’ movie, and this one’s mostly about Scott and Cassie, who is now a teen with her own super-suit and played by Kathryn Newton. But they still found ways to give Michael Douglas lots of good bits.)

Kang is not well-written; he’s bad, he’s mad, he’s a genius who wants to escape the Quantum Realm, end of story. There’s only so much that any cast or any filmmaker can do with that character to make him seem terrifying. This film does not have either the nerve or perhaps the studio’s permission to wipe that smile off your face à la last act of “Avengers: Infinity War” or middle hour of “Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom.”

There is a brief scene where Kang convinces Scott to use his thief abilities to steal this movie’s equivalent of the Ring of Power or Infinity Stone or Mother Box by threatening to murder Cassie in front of him, then make Scott re-experience her death for all eternity. But we know it’s not that kind of movie, nor one in which any major character we care about will suffer too greatly.

So Kang’s menace is conveyed through an uncharacteristically hammy performance by Majors. He seems to be channeling post-1970s Marlon Brando performances where Brando was being fed lines through an earpiece or reading them off notecards taped to other actors’ costumes. Sometimes he’ll pause forever between words in a line while staring ahead, or look up, or to the side, as if the next thought might be lurking there.

Like Brando, he’s fussing around in ways that seem to work at cross-purposes with the movie, but it’s in service of trying to make something out of nothing. One element that does intrigue: Kang seems deeply, furiously sad, in a way that echoes one of the most powerful lines from “The Sopranos,” “Depression is anger turned inward.”

Then eventually and inevitably the movie succumbs to formula and devotes its last act to a lot of overly busy CGI battles where things are crashing into other things and exploding and disintegrating while people yell about saving the universe.

The flick does overdo the self-awareness sometimes, but in that unfortunate MCU way like having a character acknowledge that something strange just happened by saying, “That was weird,” or declare another character is cool; both occur here. However the movie’s low-stress, low-stakes energy saves it.

Not particularly concerned with breaking box office records or winning Oscars, the Ant-Man movies appear to want to be cute entertainments with heart (but not so much heart that they get cloying). Whether sentimental (anything involving Scott and Cassie) or cheerfully demented (the climatic fight at the end of the first film on top of a Thomas the Tank Engine train set), light but not weightless is a good way to describe what the series manages to pull off with its size jokes and running gags and casting of Rudd, who has spent his career acting like he’s some average schlub who fell into stardom and finds it all very ridiculous.

Officially an Avenger because he’s now an alum of those big Marvel team-up pictures, Ant-Man feels more like one of Earth’s mightiest heroes’ replacement players getting a text from Thor when he calls in sick. This new movie validates Scott’s not-quite-insecurity (he’s not deep enough for existential torment) by having him get mistaken for other superheroes. He takes it in stride. Two films ago he was fired from Baskin-Robbins; before that he was in jail. Size is relative and so is happiness.

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