Film review: Ant-Man and The Wasp: Quantumania fails to deliver on its subtitle’s hyperbole
ANT-MAN AND THE WASP: QUANTUMANIA
★★★☆☆
Given the unbridled chaos that prevails at the atomic level, (12A) is a title that is simultaneously overkill and understated — although, to be fair, this third outing for Scott Lang (Paul Rudd) and his diminutive superhero alter-ego, Ant-Man, is certainly manic.
It’s a family affair, too: when Scott’s daughter Cassie (Kathryn Newton) builds the quantum realm’s equivalent of the Hubble telescope, she and Scott, along with Scott’s partner Hope (Evangeline Lilly) and her parents Janet (Michelle Pfeiffer) and Hank (Michael Douglas), are sucked into the quantum world.
Adrift in ‘a secret universe beyond space and time’, the family must find its way back home before the evil Kang the Conqueror (Jonathan Majors) tracks them down…
Previously the most irreverently humorous of the superhero franchises, which was largely due to Paul Rudd’s self-deprecating take on his minuscule character, is a different kind of movie.
Don’t be fooled by the frequent references to the ‘quantum realm’: Peyton Reed’s film is an eye-popping homage to the classic 1950s sci-fi yarns in which humans found themselves stranded on planets populated by weird and wonderful aliens (most of the minor characters look like they’ve just been barred from the cantina).
There’s plenty of weirdness, of course — we get floating heads, exotic creatures, flying buildings and probability storms — but while the production design is wonderfully inventive, humour is definitely at a premium here.
Meanwhile, the episodic story proceeds by fits and starts as a result of the main characters splitting up as they hurtle from reality down to the quantum level.
Paul Rudd makes for an affably pleasant superhero, as always, and Jonathan Majors invests Ant-Man’s rather crudely drawn nemesis with genuine gravitas, but overall fails to deliver on its subtitle’s hyperbole.
(cinema release)
