‘Ant-Man and the Wasp in Quantumania’ reviews: The villain is good, but the movie is bad

“Michael Pena’s absence should have been a warning,” wrote Kristy Puchko in her review of “Ant-Man and the Wasp in Quantumania” for Mashable. “The Marvel Cinematic Universe has grown so massive and all-consuming that it’s not enough for an Ant-Man movie to be an Ant-Man movie.”

What fans are given instead is a “chaotic, woefully unfunny mess that has forgotten why its hero was such fun.”

Puchko bemoans that both Ant-Man and the Wasp as almost relegated to sidekicks in their own movie, as Kang and Janet Van Dyne (Michelle Pfeiffer) are given the spotlight — and shine in it. (Michael Douglas also reprises his role as Dr. Hank Pym.)

The film itself is anything but light. Puchko likened the dark action scenes to those seen during the final season of HBO’s “Game Of Thrones,” blurry, dim and incoherent.

“Yet when the lights are turned up, you might wish they weren’t,” she said, noting that the Quantum Realm, a place of endless possibilities, has been imagined as “a mash-up of ‘Star Wars,’ ‘Strange World,’ slime, and those Magic Eye posters that made us squint to make sense of them.”

“In the end, with its clumsy collision of influences, star power, CGI that is often rubbery or outright ugly, and a convoluted plot that should have an Excedrin tie-in, ‘Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania’ is like a child’s mixed media project, made of paper mache, glitter, and hunks of rotting ground meat,” she said.

Majors as Kang “doesn’t disappoint,” said Kate Erbland in her review of “Quantumania” for IndieWire.

“Towering over ‘Quantumania’ and its little ant friends with genuine pathos, pain, and fear, even if the most studied MCU scholars will likely be confused by what exactly his Kang the Conquerer wants and, uh, is,” she wrote. “But cramming Majors’ Kang against Rudd’s Scott Lang [and family] … as they zip and zag through a tiny, ‘Star Wars’-influenced world doesn’t just feel confusing; it can feel outright mean.”

Erbland calls Kang “formidable,” noting Majors’ powerhouse performance solidifies the character as “the MCU’s scariest bad guy to date.”

Majors has signed on for at least two more MCU films, but won’t make an official return until Phase Six.

“The first instalment of Phase Five of the MCU comes with a lot of baggage,” wrote Charlotte O’Sullivan in her review of the film for Evening Standard.

The film is not only the third standalone Ant-Man flick, but it also has the heavy lift of introducing Kang to the big screen.

“Sometimes the weight of all this responsibility causes ‘Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania’ … to buckle at the knees,” O’Sullivan wrote.

Still, the film has heart, she said. Scott Lang’s crippling desire to care for his daughter and keep his family safe is the driving force behind the film, which hosts a solid cast.

“If you can ignore the convoluted plot – not, sadly, a rarity in the increasingly complex Marvel Cinematic Universe – you’ll have a blast with these characters,” she wrote.

“Ant-Man and The Wasp in Quantumania” has the unenviable task of wrapping up “an already scattershot MCU” and introducing the franchise’s next big bad, said Hoai-Tran Bui in her review of the film for Inverse.

“Ultimately, ‘Quantumania’ does a middling job of both. But in the process, it commits the worst sin a movie can make: it’s boring,” she said.

The film’s biggest problem, Bui posits, is that “Quantumania” is not a movie, but a building block for the future of the MCU.

“There are three movies jostling for screentime within ‘Quantumania’ — Scott and Cassie’s father-daughter story, Janet van Dyne’s repressed guilt over Kang’s origins, the Quantum Realm’s long fight to overthrow the tyrannical Kang — but they’re all overshadowed by the MCU of it all,” she wrote.

“Marvel movies have long become less like movies and more like feature-length commercials for the next thing, and ‘Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania’ is sadly the greatest embodiment of that,” Bui added. “The result is an undercooked, overstuffed action movie that feels like a shadow of better pulpy adventure sendups before it.”

The films overstuffed plot may have been forgiven “if it could have lived up to the absurd humor of the first two films,” Bui wrote.