When, exactly, did the MCU jump the shark? For me, it was with Avengers: Age of Ultron. Things were fun and getting funner on Earth-616 until 2015, when Joss Whedon assembled Earth’s mightiest heroes to fight another army of faceless, disposable enemies.
There has been a lot of ups and downs in the approximately dozen lifetimes that have transpired since then, but the one thing we could take solace in was the comforting mediocrity of Marvel movies. The MCU had a low ceiling, but a high floor. They were never great — the demands of branding always weighed the stories down with extraneous fluff — but they were never as awful as the DC super-turds they were extruding over at Warner Brothers.
I’m sad to report that with Ant-Man and The Wasp: Quantumania, the floor has finally dropped out.
Let’s begin with the title. When presented with director Peyton Reed’s idea to call the third Ant-Man film “Quantumania,” who was the coward at Disney who failed to tag an exclamation point on it?
“Quantumania!” See how much better that is?
Second, let’s talk about The Wasp (Evangeline Lilly). She is not so much a character as she is an afterthought. Occasionally, you can catch writer Jeff Loveness remembering Hope van Dyne is in the movie. Lilly plays her with a resigned detachment I find relatable.
Third, is there something I’m missing about Paul Rudd? He brings to Ant-Man a weird kind of anti-charisma, in that everything he does seems repulsive and wrong. Did he get this job because he is so bland and flavorless no one finds him offensive? Is “tolerability” really all we ask of our movie stars?
Fourth, M.O.D.O.K. (Corey Stoll) Where to even begin? Sorry, Jack Kirby heads, but M.O.D.O.K. is just a goofy character design that’s impossible to take seriously outside his Silver Age comics context. Every moment he’s on screen is excruciating.
The only characters I really liked in this meandering multiverse were Hank Pym’s (Michael Douglas) uplifted ants. When they’re sucked into the quantum realm alongside the aging super-scientist and his screwup family, they spend their time dilation doing something useful, like developing a Kardashev Type II civilization, so they can ride to the rescue like diminutive Rohirrim.
Speaking of the Pym family, all this Quantumania(!) could have been avoided if Janet van Dyne (Michelle Pfeiffer) had told her granddaughter Cassie (Kathryn Newton) what happened while she was trapped in the quantum realm for 30 years. Janet claims she didn’t tell her family about the exiled supervillain Kang the Conqueror (Jonathan Majors) because she wanted to protect them. Not to second guess a super-scientist, but wouldn’t it have been logical to just tell them, “Hey, there’s this dangerous supervillain who is trapped in the quantum realm, so maybe don’t go poking around down there?” She wouldn’t have even had to broach the subject of her affair with Lord Krylar (Bill Murray, going big) or of her role in fomenting a minuscule rebellion against the forces of Kang’s tiny tyranny.
But the worst part of Quantumania is not the stupid characters or the Baskin-Robbins product placement. This movie looks bad. I saw it in 4K, and most of the time it was a dark, swirling CGI soup. The haphazard lighting and aggressive color grading conspire to make poor Majors look constantly sweaty. I thought the Marvel shark had been well and truly jumped, but it turns out the Fonz was just getting warmed up.
Ant-Man & The Wasp: Quantumania
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