Image via Marvel
It’s said that size doesn’t matter, but that’s not the ethos of Marvel’s Ant-Man films.
Beginning with 2015’s self-titled debut and through 2018’s Ant-Man and the Wasp, director Payton Reed’s Marvel movies function as palate cleansers between Avengers installments (the 2015 debut followed Avengers: Age of Ultron, while Wasp came after the snappy ending of Infinity War). In short, Ant-Man means a small-stakes—that is engagingly fun and funny—trip to the movies, not bogged down by the larger Marvel Cinematic Universe machine.
That’s not the case with Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania, which kicks off the MCU’s staggering Phase 5 and begins the overarching Multiversal Saga storyline in full effect. What was once light fare is now responsible for introducing the next Thanos-level threat to MCU moviegoers and closing out the Ant-Man trilogy—a sentence I never thought I would type when the first film hit in 2015—in a satisfying way.
Quantumania picks up with Scott Lang (Paul Rudd), Hope Van Dyne (Evangeline Lilly), Hank Pym (Michael Douglas), and Janet Van Dyne (Michelle Pfeiffer) in the intervening four years after Endgame. Lang is now a bestselling author, having sold an autobiography about his role in assisting the Avengers against Thanos. Hope is now running Hank’s company as a nonprofit. In short, it seems like the superhero-ing days of Ant-Man and the Wasp are done; the most action the two see is donning their Pym Particle–enhanced suits to sneak away and enjoy a cold sixer of beer on top of the Golden Gate Bridge. The most trouble in their lives comes as Scott’s daughter Cassie (Kathryn Newton) enters a rebellious streak; a humorous scene at the beginning of the film sees her use Pym Particles to shrink a cop car that was clearing displaced residents from an encampment.
Cassie’s newfound heroics aren’t the only thing she’s up to, as she soon shows off a telescope she built to explore and communicate with the Quantum Realm with the larger group. As the receiver starts to ping a signal, the entire Van Dyne/Lang clan is sucked back into the subatomic universe, where they discover the universe is under the control of Kang the Conqueror (Jonathan Majors), who is particularly keen to leave after being trapped there by Janet. To escape, he needs a reluctant Scott to help acquire a missing object.
Those following the mighty MCU machine know Quantumania arrives with giant-sized expectations after a decidedly up-and-down Phase 4, which made me cautious about how Reed and writer Jeff Loveness (Rick and Morty) would balance the two different narrative masters. The answer to that lingering question is better than I anticipated but makes for some distinctive tonal variance. I reacted to the film similarly to how I reacted to last summer’s Thor: Love & Thunder; I desperately wanted that movie to be darker than it was, and I longed for Quantumania to lean more into its action-comedy roots.
The arrival of Kang into the cinematic side of the MCU (a version or variant of Kang appeared back in 2021’s Loki season finale) brings weight to it that the movie can’t quite support, as the sections featuring Majors come across as deeply serious and feel radically out of place in a film which skews toward silly Rick and Morty–inspired sensibilities (like a glob-like creature Scott and Cassie encounter early on in the Quantum Realm is obsessed with the number of holes humans have). It’s hard to know what we’re supposed to feel at a given moment, and it causes some of the jokes to fall flat or heavier moments not to land.
It doesn’t help that part of the Van Dyne clan feels like they don’t have much to do. Once they land in the Quantum Realm, Hank and Hope fade into the background as Janet takes the stage. After being woefully underused in Ant-Man and the Wasp, returning an actor as captivating as Pfeiffer to the forefront is a smart choice; I wish she had more to do than just functioning as an exposition machine to fill in audiences about Kang’s history. Speaking of Majors, he elevates material that feels underwritten—especially for what’s supposed to be the next big bad of the MCU. Kang’s motivation doesn’t extend past wanting revenge, but Majors makes you believe that single-tracked fury and rage. Scott fares the best out of everyone, however, thanks to Rudd, who puts up a performance worthy of his beloved Patrick Mahomes; never is there any doubt about Scott’s motivations and Rudd manages to make even the most absurd moments work.
Visually, Quantumania fares much better. While the CGI remains spotty in some areas, leveraging ILM’s StageCraft technology pioneered on the set of The Mandalorian makes the Quantum Realm feel appropriately vibrant. The production design evokes Star Wars, but it accomplishes its goal of feeling otherworldly and tactile in a way that Marvel sometimes struggles to achieve. Reed also fills the movie with some impressive set pieces, the standout of which is a mid-movie sequence featuring multiple Scotts that elegantly threads the needle between humor and heart in the way previous Ant-Man flicks did. It’s an immediately memorable highlight and reminds me a lot of the piano battle from Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness in its creative and visual execution.
Some movies just don’t have the foundation to scale up, and that’s the core frustration of Quantumania, which just tries to accomplish too much, too quickly, and gets away from the heart of what’s made prior installments so special. The film serves as a firm reminder that sometimes, bigger isn’t always better.
Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania hits theaters on Friday, Feb. 17.