No, ‘Ant-Man And The Wasp: Quantumania’ Isn’t Good

Seeing the review scores roll in for Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania, it was surprising to see that it was shaping up to be the second-ever “rotten” reviewed MCU movieteetering just a single percentage point above Eternals, 48% to 47%.

But! Audience scores are high, currently at 85% as I write this, and despite being a critic myself, I disagreed with them on Eternals. So I figured I should see this thing for myself, and make my own judgement.

Turns out…nope, critics are right this time, sorry fans. Quantumania, despite a standout performance from one character in particular, is just not very good.

I was always middling on the first two Ant-Man movies, which I thought were okay, but certainly in the bottom half of MCU fare. Paul Rudd is charming, and I like the idea of a superhero who is just sort of a doofus, which he plays well.

But this time around, setting the entire movie in the Quantum Realm is just…exhausting. Like literally exhausting. I was tired of looking at the place within ten minutes, and it’s just unrelenting.

If you are setting your live-action movie in a location that needs to essentially be 100% CGI at all times, you better be James freaking Cameron, because no one else has the tech to make this look as good as it needs to, and certainly not now when there’s a strain on the entire animation industry because of projects just like this, which lately had led to rather poor effects in Thor: Love and Thunder, She-Hulk and now here, too.

The locations are…fine, they just blur together in a bizarro painting of nothingness. This feels like this could have been a beautiful movie about a mystical, uncharted realm with a little art direction, but it has none. When the effects get outright bad is whatever the hell they did with poor Corey Stoll’s face to stretch it across the MODOK rig. I get that MODOK is supposed to be comic relief here, and always has a weird giant face in the comics, but there were audible gasps in the audience when he appeared, and you could feel everyone collectively cringing whenever he did anything because of just how awful it looked.

The story has no real emotional center, which is a core tenet of why most MCU movies are actually pretty good. Here, the storyline is just that Janet Van Dyne essentially lied to everyone about her time in the Quantum Zone for no real reason, but in reality, she met Kang, who was exiled there, helped him fix his time chair ship until she figured out what a monster he was, then blew up his power core to trap him again. Then, Kang went on to become emperor of the microrealm.

There is supposed to be some sort of family bonding thing going on here, but I just don’t feel that chemistry between any of the characters, especially Hope, who barely feels present at all despite being in the title of the movie. The conflict is reduced to “Scott do this thing for me or I will kill your daughter” and of course, the family comes together to instead save the day rather than all being murdered by Kang. There was a point where I genuinely wondered if the Ant-Man trilogy might end with Kang beating Scott to death and escaping in the closing moments, a riff on Thanos executing Loki, but Disney didn’t want to go that far, I guess.

The good news is that Kang himself, played by so-hot-right-now-and-also-just-hot Jonathan Majors is excellent. He really, really feels like he should be in an entirely different movie with an entirely different cast, and I mean, he’s going to be, soon enough, but thankfully the film isn’t so bad that it tanks him conceptually as a villain or anything. Majors is fortunate that unlike Thanos or Ultron, he gets to act with his actual face not covered in mo-cap dots and replaced by something purple or metal. As such, I’m hoping maybe he can be more like Loki in a way. Terrifying and charismatic. He’s off to a good start here (and of course, back when he was first introduced by Loki himself).

Yes, I think the MCU is having trouble finding itself in the wake of Endgame, and Phase 4 has been a series of wild ups and downs. This is definitely a down, and I’m just not convinced we ever needed three Ant-Man movies in the first place.

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