‘Ant Man and the Wasp: Quantamania’ (hereafter Quantamania) is hot plastic muck. To varying degrees of success, the Marvel Cinematic Universe has consistently delivered enjoyable action movies that serve up a decent blend of sentimentality, thrills and laughs. It’s true that few could point to the Ant-Man movies as top–tier Marvel. But Paul Rudd’s everyman affability and his ant-sized super heroics, often involving bouncing around and through mundane objects, provided those films a novelty that made them stand out.

Sadly, this Ant Man sequel, with its ambitions to add to the larger Marvel mythology, does away with that novelty almost right away by dispatching Ant Man and his family to the Quantum Realm, a dangerous sub-atomic universe. There they battle exiled supervillain Kang while trying to find a way back home. 

Although the Quantum Realm itself is rendered with eye-catching painterly psychedelia and a few neat touches of gelatinous weirdness, the slipshod filmmaking saps the energy out of most scenes. It rarely felt like the actors were truly interacting with, or being affected by, this otherwordly environment. This is in stark contrast to the previous Ant Man movie set-pieces, in which the large and small-scale action was creatively crafted to convey a sense of wonder in an ordinary setting like a kitchen or bedroom. Quantamania clearly has a much larger scope; whole societies and factions populate the Quantum Realm yet it’s completely lacking in texture and character. 

Paul Rudd and Michael Douglas each get a couple of moments to deploy their charm and wit. But the human element is quashed by its visually noisy setting, despite the best efforts of all involved. Jonathan Majors as Kang is the closest thing Quantamania has to a compelling character and even he is visibly struggling mightly to make something out of very little. It’s a performance full of interesting tics that suggest a depth of character the script isn’t interested in delving into. With his imperious fury, intelligence and ability to vaporise random characters (not the main heroes, naturally) there’s little that separates him from a standard villain. This guy is clearly being primed to be the Marvel Universe’s big bad for the next number of years and this surely isn’t a great start.

Anyway, the Marvel machine will keep humming along. It’s almost too big to fail, and that’s probably part of the problem. If the continuing results are as algorithmically generated as Quantamania though, well…count me out.

2 Stars out of 5