Review of Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania (2023) by Inshane — 18 Feb 2023

"Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania" was...... Mid.

And I say that, going into this Marvel film with the utmost enthusiasm: I was hoping for an exciting start to phase 5 since we had such a dim and unfocused phase 4, but instead, we open with a whimper for this newest phase. Using Ant-Man to start off phase 5 seemed like a very interesting and safe choice as this was more of a “Marvel kick off” film than it was an actual “Ant-Man” film, if that makes sense.

The first noticeable issue with this film was in the visual effects. While there were a lot of cool and fun ideas, it’s clear that the visual effects weren’t given ample time to be worked in properly. Like most Marvel films with this issue, the visuals reflect how rushed and overworked the VFX teams are for these movies, being given little time to work properly. We were given a new character who came out looking worse than Mr. Electric from 2005’s “Sharkboy and Lavagirl.” I don’t know if making them look like that was intentional, but even if it was intentional… It still looked terrible. It seems like the visual effects in Marvel films are showing more and more fatigue similar to my ever-growing MCU fatigue.

Most of the performances were decent, though, said performances are weakened by the biggest most annoying issue with current Marvel movies which is the seemingly obsessive need to make every character a quippy-kooky-quirkster, and stuffing humor into scenes where humor doesn't belong. This phenomenon seems to be getting worse and worse with each piece of Marvel media that is released. I think “Quantumania” would have been better if there wasn’t so much forced, sitcomy humor undercutting all the action and drama… It just gets in the way. However, the main spot where this movie gets ANY real clean praise at all, would be with Jonathan Majors performance as Kang: My dude delivered in every aspect especially when compared to other performances (Kathryn Newton was lookin’ kinda stiff out there) and being this films saving grace. Kang was big and menacing and even a bit sympathetic at some points, establishing himself as a solid antagonist for the MCU.

"Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania" isn’t a bad movie, but boy-howdy, is it underwhelming. Watching events unfold in this film was like watching someone play a videogame on easy mode for the first 2/3 until the last 1/3 of the film where the pause button is pushed, and the difficulty setting is switched to hard mode only because the steaks had to be higher because it was the end of the movie. If this is how we're starting a MCU phase, then I'm kinda worried for the rest of Phase 5 and Phase 6. Hopefully things pick up a bit in the next few shows/movies.

5/10, the score would be lower had it not been for Jonathan Majors’ performance as Kang.