REVIEW #251 Antman & The Wasp: Quantumania (2023)

Ant-man and The Wasp find themselves exploring the Quantum Realm, interacting with strange new creatures and embarking on new adventures…until they meet Marvels deadliest villain yet!

The third instalment in the Ant-Man film trilogy is one that has me completely torn, more so than any other MCU film to date. At times we witness some of the best performances and the most spectacular world building thus far in the franchise, but it was a roll of the dice as to the quality of the next scene. Sometimes the shots were reminiscent of what I watched in Spy Kids 4… I can’t help but think how such contrasting scenes can exist in the same film, it’s like they were made by completely different studios. That being said I do think it was a great introduction to Kang, a dominantly powerful Kang anyway! Jonathan majors completely knocked it out of the park, oozing excellence in every scene he was in. He also brought out the best in Paul Rudd who proved that he could compete with the best when it comes to powerful emotion and even the brutal combat scenes too. 

Positives: 

The storyline itself makes complete sense, the reasoning for this version of Kang being stuck in the Quantum Realm, his links to Janet, why Ant-man and co would be the first heroes to encounter him… I can get behind all of that and it links wonderfully well to the events of Loki, setting up a really positive future for the MCU. I was expecting a different outcome for Kang The Conqueror…but I’ll leave it there to avoid spoilers! All that matters is Jon returns again and again because like I mentioned before, he’s by far the best part of the movie. The relationship between Scott and Cassie was great and it brought out a more emotional side to Scott which was needed and I enjoyed it very much. The visuals certainly stood out when the characters weren’t in frame, large landscape shots looked amazing and it created one of the best environments in the MCU, the Quantum Realm like we have never seen before! Vibrant colours, incredible designs and imaginative concepts. I also appreciated Hank a lot more in this third film, Michael Douglas does superbly and although he’s not the character at the forefront, I feel like he delivered when it mattered. 

Negatives:

Unfortunately the comedic tone that Ant-Man has found much success with, fell rather flat for me. I found 90% of the comedy extremely cringe worthy and it seriously brought down the quality of the film. Rewatching Thor love and thunder really opened my eyes to how bad some of the comedy has been since the start of phase 4 and that poor form continued here. But it was not only the humour that was too cheesy, it was also certain characters too. Most of the quantum realm inhabitants were just as silly, a blob with a fascination for holes… the writers seriously need to up their game because that’s just so so poor. Another area of criticism is MODOK, I understand now why they wanted his exterior armour because wow, what was underneath looked terrible! Now, I have sympathy for them here because no matter what they done with Modok’s design, in live action, it was always going to look a bit silly, so I can forgive them on that. But what I can’t forgive is how his storyline played out, they made an absolute mockery of him at the end and it was just absolutely awful. Who knew that all we needed to do was to tell the villains “don’t be a dick” and their reign or tyranny would come to a swift conclusion! The areas of the plot I struggled with were ‘cheat codes’ just chucked in to help make the film run smoother. My big example was the ants being in the realm for a thousand years, despite arriving at the same time and in the same way too the central characters. A live action cheat code to justify the big set piece ending, the easy route in my opinion. Finally I want to mention how poor some of the green screen was when characters were in shot, it seriously ruined the amazing visuals and with the budget of marvel films, these issues shouldn’t be happening in every single project! 

Overall (6.8/10)

Thanks for reading.

Callan