Main cast: Paul Rudd (Scott Lang/Ant-Man), Evangeline Lilly (Hope Van Dyne/The Wasp), Jonathan Majors (Kang the Conqueror), Kathryn Newton (Cassie Lang), David Dastmalchian (Veb), Katy O’Brian (Jentorra), William Jackson Harper (Quaz), Bill Murray (Lord Krylar), Michelle Pfeiffer (Janet Van Dyne), Corey Stoll (Darren Cross/MODOK), and Michael Douglas (Dr Hank Pym)
Director: Peyton Reed
Oh boy, how is hiring cheap, inexperienced people, whose sole hype was having their talents overblown by the obsessive fandom of Rick and Morty, working out for Disney?
The fact that Kevin Feige and friends believe that hiring clown school screenwriters would elevate the Marvel Cinematic Universe is a hoot, as most people stop caring once the market is flooded with mediocre to horrible crap, and the new phase begins with a flop of hilarious degree.
Why is anyone surprised that this movie flopped worse than a whale on a beach? The promotional posters for Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania looks like a high-tier reward for top backers in some indie video game Kickstarter, and the moment MODOK is shown in the trailer, it’s game over.
In this one, Cassie Lang has grown up and shocker: she’s another precious girl genius with insufferable terminal me-me-me-ness. Sure, you can argue that she’s a teenage brat, and teenage brats are all like that, but the issue here is that we have so many of these obnoxious girl genius types littering the recent MCU shows that this character just feels like some lazy cut and paste reskin. She’s rude, patronizing, condescending, and the snot is responsible for all the mess in this movie.
Yes, she invents this Convenient Plot Device that sends her whole family into the Quantum Realm. Scott and Cassie is one part of that place, the better for Scott to keep yelling her name every 10 or so minutes for the obligatory quality “Dad, you cleaned up all my messes, so now I know you love me and I can magnanimously hug you back!” daddy-daughter bonding story arc.
Predictably, that snot is not held accountable for it even a little because in the MCU, women can’t be responsible for their actions, they can do whatever they want, and if you disagree, then you are… well, whatever they will call people that disagree with them these days. Racist? Sexist? Transphobe? White supremacist? MAGA? It’s hard to say, as these people have so many enemies to cancel that they come up with new insults every other day.
The remaining three are just sort of there, where Hank learns that Janet banged every male they meet when she was trapped here ages ago and he’s perfectly fine with it as long as he gets to watch or hold the camera or something, and Hope tries to remain relevant by wondering where her husband and daughter are every 10 minutes or so of her screen time.
Oh, the Quantum Realm is ruled by Kang, the scariest version, the most dastardly version, the… the… wait, so he’s dead, just like that? Whatever.
Right, there’s MODOK, who looks like a bad CGI from some 1980s sci-fi TV show, and he is actually a frustrated fellow that turns mean, only to be turned good again when Cassie tells him to do so. I’m sure there is nary a dry eye in the cinema during that scene, as it is indeed top tier screenwriting to cram down the audience’s throat that teenage girls are the wisest beings in the universe and they should rule the entire creation so that life as we know it will be a neverending MCU movie—the endgame of every life form in the universe.
This is such a high quality story, I tell you.
I like Paul Rudd, and I generally like Scott, but here he is reduced to being the mule and the grunt that has to somehow prove himself to his imbecile snot knob of a daughter as if he needed to win her respect for some reason. Evangeline Lilly has absolutely nothing to do here.
Michelle Pfeiffer’s Janet is now a town bicycle responsible for the biggest annoying plot contrivance in the whole movie: she just can’t, can’t, can’t tell the others what a meanie Kang is. I don’t know why, as it’s not like Kang’s identity is a secret… well, I suppose it is to people that didn’t watch the last episode of the first season of Loki, I guess. The pre-release hype round was all about these Disney people paying the media to hype up Jonathan Majors as the sexiest, hottest, most talented person alive, so it’s not like Kang being the villain in this show is some kind of NDA stuff.
Heh, since he did an Ezra Miller, I wonder if they’d recast him or stick to their guns. Maybe Mr Majors should announce that he’s non-binary too.
I’m torn about the gaudy aesthetics of this movie. The special effects can be bad, but at the same time, there is a campy, even nostalgic retro vibe to them, like the whole thing is a fever dream of the worst SNES games back in those days.
Also, the hideous cosmetics and costumes, as well as the ridiculous characters that live in the Quantum Realm all make me wonder whether the intention all along is to capture the vibe of sci-fi TV shows of the old days, like Flash Gordon or Buck Rogers in the 25th Century, because of the always amusing scenes of people in alien costumes just standing around talking in a ludicrously fake set and action scenes that are far more absurd than suspenseful.
Had the garish gaudy eyesore of the whole movie been intentional, I could like it if the script weren’t so dull. That’s the problem with these Rick and Morty people hired to do the stories. I don’t know why they don’t seem to get it, but for ugly CGIs and stupid stories to work magic, everything needs to be dialed up to absurdly nonsensical levels.
Sadly, though, this movie repeats the lazy “Let’s all try hard to be the next Joss Whedon or James Gunn!” formula that sank the last handful of MCU releases. This is bad because the people responsible for the scripts and stories don’t know how to emulate those two in even a halfway decent degree. Worse, they can’t even do awful in an entertaining manner!
In the end, this movie isn’t good, but it is also not bad enough to be fun. It’s just an embarrassing thing that serves up jokes after jokes that keep failing to land in spite of Mr Rudd’s best efforts, all the while laboring under the delusion that the annoying characters and their repetitive one-note antics are somehow adorable, progressive, and groundbreaking.
While it doesn’t deserve to be the biggest flop in MCU history to date (ahem), a part of me is glad that it did flop, if only to give the idiots running the MCU a wake-up call. I doubt they will learn anything from this debacle, but I’d like to be proven wrong. I’m not holding my breath to find out, though!
