Scott Lang is no longer a no-name thief in Quantumania. He saved the world once, remember? If it wasn’t for Ant-Man the Avengers would have never defeated Thanos and in the years since Lang has been coasting on his newfound fame. He is a man that has it all. He’s finally managed to keep a good relationship with his daughter Cassie, he has a partner in the beautiful and brilliant Hope van Dyne / the Wasp, played by Evangeline Lilly, and random people on the street stop him to take pictures with their dogs.

The opening shot sees Lang regale the audience with a “This is how I’ve been doing how about you?” monologue. Setting up the film as a low-stakes, low-pressure romp buoyed by the endlessly charismatic everyman Paul Rudd who manages to effortlessly straddle the fine line between affable and heroic as if he was ripped from the pages of Steve Ditko.

Suddenly Lang receives a call from the local county jail, and has to bail out his daughter. She isn’t a thief like him, she was arrested for helping out the little guy – a major theme throughout the film. In fact, all the previous Ant-Man movies, each directed by Peyton Reed (Yes Man, The Break-Up), have been about small, and making small a big deal. One of the most memorable set pieces from the first film was a battle on a model train set in a child’s room, setting up the film’s best joke.

In Quantumania, Ant-Man is literally and figuratively the biggest he’s ever been. This focus on huge is exemplified by the Quantum Realm itself, which our heroes, including Hank Pym (Michael Douglas) and Janet van Dyne (Michelle Pfeiffer), get sucked into with barely any explanation. The rest of the film’s runtime is devoted to this alien world, somehow impossibly microscopic and gigantic at the same time.

The first act is the best of the movie, with Marvel pumping all of its creative juices into the Quantum Realm and the things living there. Giant amoebas, walking organic buildings that look like they’ve been plucked from a Mobuis painting, mitochondria motorbikes, an alien bruiser with a galaxy for a brain and a little slime man who is obsessed with holes (stop it).

It’s a bizarre and psychedelic place with some of the strangest designs in the MCU yet, but then Quantumania does something terribly heartbreaking. As soon as you start believing that you’re seeing something new, something unique and interesting. Something that harkens back to your youth and the fascination with discovering things you have never, ever seen before, it pulls the rug from under your feet.

When you look up, you see just another Marvel movie. The same one you’ve seen for the last decade. From the second act, Quantumania is same old, same old. It descends into a “gathering the disparate masses to defeat the Big Bad” plot. It even has a rousing speech appealing to never give up hope and “We can do this if we fight together!”

Once the facade is lifted, you realise that this is simply a vehicle for Marvel to introduce, as Loki season one head writer Michael Waldron puts it, the “next big cross-movie villain.” Kang the Conqueror, played by the clearly talented Jonathan Majors, is only interested in getting the film’s shiny MacGuffin.

There has been much discussion about the Marvel movie villain and their “motivations.” In the end, Kang wants to stop a coming disaster, and he needs the MacGuffin to do so. But instead of joining forces with the good guys, he’s terrible to them. For no reason. Why is Kang so evil? Who knows. Don’t think about it. Look at the pretty CGI.

Kang is set up as a bad guy, and in fact, most of the film’s plotholes are glossed over, by Michelle Pfeiffer’s character, who is such a powerhouse that it almost makes sense. There are no bad performances here by the cast and everyone brings their A-game to Quantumania, but some of the intimate scenes, especially between Janet and her daughter Hope, and between Lang and Cassie, are weighed down by a somewhat stilted script.

Some scenes had me asking if people actually talk like this. The film also carries “and the Wasp” in the title, and yet Evangeline Lilly may have said around 15 things in the entire runtime. She is important to the plot and saves the day a few times, but otherwise, she is just… there. I wanted a bit more wasping in the wasp movie, honestly.

By the time the Deus Ex Machina, you’ll never guess what it is (you probably will), saves the day in the third act, Quantumania is all CGI, green-screen battles. Nothing new to see here. It’s Star Wars and Avengers and Guardians of the Galaxy and Thor. It’s Marvel by the numbers, and that’s the most upsetting part.

We almost had something different. The first Ant-Man film was different to the rest because it went small when the other Marvel movies went big. Now, closing up the trilogy, Ant-Man is as big as ever, and it doesn’t matter anymore. There is no character development, nothing changes except that there is now a new villain for the Avengers to thrash.

Other reviews have pointed to Kevin Feige stunting the creative output of Marvel Studios in a bid to keep his Disney Machine coughing up content, and it seems Quantumania was not spared the axe. This will continue until Marvel returns to the drawing board. Starts a new, grounded story of real people and sprinkles in some superpowers. More Iron Man and less The Eternals.

For me, the studio peaked with the dopamine storm of Avengers Endgame, and I recommend going back and watching that if you have a hankering for super hero trials and tribulations. I kept wanting more from my viewing of Quantumania, and you might too.

Believe me, you won’t be missing anything.

FINAL SCORE: 5 OUT OF 10.

Ant-Man and the Wasp Quantumania releases nationwide in South African theatres on 17th February 2023.

[Image – Marvel]