Another one from Marvel

Film Review

Tinashe Kusema

I AM all for suspending belief and playing along to the whole “long-term” storytelling the Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU) has turned into a thing.

However, I draw the line at expecting Jonathan Majors’ Kang character to be a high-level threat in the same breath as Thanos.

After all, this is a guy who just recently got brought down by a group of ants and fails to beat Scott Lang and Hope van Dyne (Paul Rudd and Evangeline Lilly’s ‘Ant-Man and the Wasp’) in hand-to-hand combat.

Spoiler alert, by the way!

Prior to its release, “Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania” was billed as the ushering in of the MCU’s Phase Five, with its selling point being the formal introduction to Kang “The Conqueror”.

To say that the end product has been a colossal disappointment would be an understatement.

With the exception of Paul Rudd, who seems to have made the Scott Lang character his own, there is nothing memorable about the film.

The visuals are all over the place, the pacing looks more like a marathon and Jonathan Majors’ performance is uninspiring.

Kevin Fergie and his team have a lot of work to do if they are to rebuild the character and make it worthy of its own “Avengers” movie.

There is still plenty of time, given that “Avengers: The Kang Dynasty” drops on May 2, 2025.

But I digress.

“Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania” picks up some time after the events of “Avengers: Endgame”.

Scott Lang (Rudd) is starting to feel more comfortable in his own skin and trying to make up for lost time with his daughter Cassie (Kathryn Newton).

Unfortunately, Cassie is now hell-bent on following her father’s footsteps. She took a liking to the sciences and found herself studying the quantum realm.

An accident during a show sees Lang and Dyne families sucked into the quantum realm, where Janet van Dyne (Michelle Pfeiffer) is forced to confront her demons from the 30 years she spent in that place.

Apparently, Janet Van Dyne met and built a friendship with a time traveller exiled into the quantum realm by his doppelgangers.

His name was Kang (Majors) and his crime was that he caused distraction across all time and space.

With the quantum realm residing outside of time and space, it was the right prison to hold me.

The two work on fixing his ship up until she discovers his true intentions and why he was banished there in the first place.

She destroys an important part of his ship and escapes. This then leads to a cat-and-mouse game between her and Kang.

The film lacks the charm and humour of its predecessors and that is largely due to the absence of Michael Pena’s Luis character.

Together with the duo of David Dastmalchian’s Kurt and former rapper TI’s Dave, Luis is a central and integral part of the movie franchise.

Collectively known as the “Three Wombats”, these three characters provide a huge chunk of the previous film’s humour and charm and their absence is greatly felt in “Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania”.

The visuals and the quantum realm itself are really unnecessary and could have been something that gets explained rather than described.

Again, Fergie and company should have left the quantum realm as a complex and unexplained science.

This is not to say the film is entirely bad.

As I alluded to earlier, Rudd does yet another fantastic job in his portrayal of Scott Lang, aka Ant-Man, and I especially loved his dynamic and chemistry with Newton.

The father-and-daughter combo helps keep the audience invested and Newton also does a stellar job in the performance department.

It is still a bit too early to chastise Major for his performance here.

This is largely due to the fact that an actor’s worth is based on the material he is handed and the writers here did not really do justice to the character.

Since its release back in February, “Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania” has grossed over US$600 million, working off a US$200 million budget, which is not bad or surprising.

MCU movies generally do good business.

Here is hoping the next MCU project “Guardians of the Galaxy Volume 3” fares better, both critically and commercially.

There is a lot riding on this movie, due for release on May 5, as it is the franchise’s final film.