Quantumania introduces a major new villain but shrinks Ant-Man's appeal
As the stakes get bigger the size-changing hero risks losing what made him so refreshing
Even drowning in a day glow colour scheme and overrun with a collection of creatures who look like rejects from Jim Henson's workshop there's a certain listless quality Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania shares with too many Marvel movies.
Then Jonathan Majors strides on screen and rescues it from the morass of mediocrity. Cast as Kang the Conqueror, Majors is suited up in a green and purple costume, the now recognizable Marvel mixture of plastic and latex, his face marked with prosthetic scars.
The Kirbyeque colour scheme does him no favours. But when he speaks, you lean in a little closer. You feel the character's weariness. Even his pauses are riveting. This is the face of a man who has stared into the yawning maw of the infinite.
This isn't Majors' first film. Far from it. He was featured in the HBO series Lovecraft Country and the highly underrated The Last Black Man in San Francisco. Now he's having a moment.
Fresh from his appearance as a pilot in the film Devotion, he's already earning raves for his performance in the buzzy Sundance film Magazine Dreams and will go toe to toe with Michael B. Jordan next month in Creed III.
As Kang, Majors plays an ageless character who can skip across timelines and seeks to control everything.
Even with his face hidden behind a shimmering blue force field, he gives the despot a certain sense of vulnerability. There's a sad kindness in his gaze before the inevitable energy bolts appear.
Quantumania asks: Now what?
So how did we get here? Quantumania takes place after the events of Avengers: Infinity War and Endgame. When we first catch up with Paul Rudd's character Scott Lang, a.k.a. shrinking hero Ant-Man, he's facing the same problem as Marvel Studios: Now what?
The first decade of the Marvel Cinematic Universe had a plan: A carefully laid out arc with Iron Man and the villain Thanos slowly building toward a blockbuster conclusion. In the post-Endgame era of Marvel movies it often feels we're still chasing the same high from the previous films as the magic ebbs away.
So what do you do after you've saved the Earth, the universe and everything? If you're Lang, you pose for selfies and write a book. Luckily for him and us in the audience, inventor Hank Pym (Michael Douglas) and Lang's teenage daughter, Cassie (Kathryn Newton), have been mucking around in the quantum realm. When their research project goes awry, all three of them, along with Hank's wife and daughter, Janet and Hope van Dyne (Michelle Pfeiffer and Evangeline Lilly, respectively), are pulled into the microverse.
Like Jodorowsky's Dune come to life, it's a wild and woolly realm filled with fungal-like forests, cotton candy skies and creatures that resemble extras from the Mos Eisley cantina.
Director Peyton Reed cranks the weird factor up to 11, but there's no unifying principal. Some characters are gritty freedom fighters such as Jentorra, a warrior woman who spits out phrases like: "He built his citadel on the bones of our people." Then there's Veb, a fishbowl with four legs and a brain floating in drinkable ooze.
Majors makes you care
The only redeeming feature of the quantum misadventure is that it provides Scott and Cassie some much needed daddy-daughter time. Newton doesn't have much to work with, but she shines as a teen trying to follow in her father's footsteps.
Although Quantumania is packed with wacky characters, including a squandered Bill Murray, it doesn't find its groove until Majors arrives. Suddenly, the story has clearly defined stakes and something to push against. Kang's ultimate aims may be run of the mill — conquer the universe, obliterate the timelines, yada, yada, yada — but Majors makes you care.
Marvel fans know Quantumania is the beginning of a much larger storyline, the much hyped "Phase 5" of the MCU. If you don't know your Juggernauts from your Jokers that may not mean much, but all you really need to know is we'll be seeing a lot more of Majors, and that's a good thing.
As for the tiny titular hero? When he first appeared in Ant-Man back in 2015, Rudd's real super power was his irreverence. As an ex-con turned good guy, Lang's sense of wonder and amusement was infectious, complimented by a superb supporting cast: Michael Douglas as the crotchety inventor and of course the hilarious off-kilter energy of Lang's pal Luis, played by Michael Peña.
I'm sorry to report Peña is MIA in Quatumania. That's unfortunate. The film could have used his hilarious flashbacks. Instead we get Rudd levelling up to be the stoic hero.
This is the Marvel way: The studio recruits actors and directors for their distinctive qualities, but over time the thing that stuck out about them gets filed down, until they're just part of the machine. With Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania we get more of the same, but also a promising preview of an actor who could define the next era of cinema, for Marvel and beyond.
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