The messy title says it all - 4/10

by Jad Sammour

I did not have a good time watching Ant-Man and The Wasp: Quantumania for a variety of reasons that are so glaring, I couldn't ignore them and try to enjoy the film. It feels like a waste of time as all it achieves is a failed spectacle of murky VFX and uninspired events that are incredibly deja-vu. The script failed to generate any emotional impact or any intrigue, collaging familiar beats, humor, motivations, side-stories, and excessive exposition. This film had the worst humor in an MCU film. The story is the plot of Tron: Legacy, mixed with a bit of Star Wars and Dune and set in the MCU featuring the Ant-Man characters – it even borrows visuals from these aforementioned movies. The action sequences and set pieces offer nothing new, with an almost nonexistent fun-factor. 

The characters in Quantumania are very forgettable. Paul Rudd plays himself, Kathryn Newton is okay and doesn’t have proper chemistry with Rudd. Evangeline Lilly’s role was really shrunk-down (pun unintended) and she was barely in the film. Michael Douglas delivered his lines like a relaxed, drunk old man as if he was in a different movie. Michelle Pfiefer’s performance was the best and she stole the show when she was given the screen. Now every MCU saga brings in a new Villain and Kang gets a sized introduction in this film - via an hour of teasing (which isn't effective if you know he is the villain and you've seen Loki) and a decent backstory (that barely explains his actual goals and motivations) and I still don’t get the hype. This role isn't for Jonathan Majors: Kang comes off as a wooden generic villain with no charisma, no threatening presence, and a vague backstory and motives that don’t go beyond the generic “I-want-to-destroy-the-world” bad guy energy - and even when the film tries to properly explain his goals, it does it vaguely without anything convincing to build sympathy or understanding. In short, he is not a compelling villain - if he is not going to show up in other films, he would've been very forgettable. What doesn’t help, is the awful, goofy costume of his – it’s terrible! And one last thing, he has extremely powerful beams that disintegrate anyone when he fires at them but not when he uses them against one of the main characters which he does ONE TIME?? Come on…. MODOK is in this film and his character is turned into the butt of every joke. Bill Murray got a quick paycheck and left. Many side characters and their dynamics were pulled right out of Thor Ragnarok - even an entire subplot is copied from Ragnarok and pasted here.

The musical score was fine. The visual effects were good but the designs were murky and weird - not a fan of the visuals, at all. The cinematography is full of okay shots that add nothing to the film. There was some nice editing sometimes, and the film advances at a good pace.

You could see the straining in this film to try and do something new and special within the MCU but the end product is a soulless rehash of the exhausted “Marvel film Bingo”. It was sad seeing them sacrificing the third Ant-Man film for this. The previous films in the trilogy were much, much better. This may be just me, but it felt like they were breaking some rules established in other films - shrinking and growing rules - but I have to double check this

Overall, Quantumania just barely passes two hours of your time without achieving anything particularly good except teasing the next big bad guy - which it fails at doing. It's not boring but not captivating: just forgettable and underwhelming.

 

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