Starring  Paul Rudd, Evangeline Lilly, Jonathan Majors, Kathryn Newton, Michelle Pfeiffer, Corey Stoll, and Michael Douglas.

Directed by Peyton Reed

Disney, out now on 4K, Blu-ray, DVD and Digital

(mild spoilers)

Cassie Lang makes contact with the Quantum Realm…

This is a complex story to talk about. The first film of Phase 5, Ant-Man’s third outing and Kang the Conqueror’s second (after a version of him appeared in Loki).

After the end of Phase 4 with the elegiac Wakanda Forever, Ant-Man opens up a new Avengers arc, a new phase for Marvel and does so by crossing the generations between what has come before and what’s ahead of us.

In other words there’s a lot coming together in this film – lots of different narrative threads and lots of different legacies and directions to take account of, balance and try to thread into two hours of story telling.

In that I think the movie fails. I think it fails because the story here doesn’t ever really get going – swamped as it is by the pressing need to do heavy world building around Kang and the Quantum Realm.

As with so many other Marvel movies there’s simply too much going on. Too many characters, too little time and too many stories which start, get turned around and aren’t ever mentioned again.

Add to that a Quantum Realm which exists ‘outside of time’ but which fails to capitalise on any of its inherent possibilities and you have something that is substantially less than the sum of its parts.

Because on paper this film has a lot of positives – a new generation taking over, family fighting for one another, some wicked ideas about politics and what good societies do and are, as well as arguments about what it means to be a good ally.

Furthermore, there are hints of deeper relationships, conflicts that bring with them the legacy of lived lives and the raw edges of close friends who’ve gone in different directions – and yet all of this is left on the shelf.

In many ways this shares exactly the same flaws as every movie in Phase 4 – namely that regardless of the director or characters we must end the movie with a physical confrontation that showcases special powers where no one dies and everyone gets a happy ever after.

There are no consequences in Marvel. There is no weight or risk or fear because, in the end, everyone always lives. Honestly, a character is more likely to leave the franchise because the real world actor has grown too old to convincingly play them than they are to exit because of narrative reasons.

This speaks to a lack of storytelling integrity that is hard to look away from and it does something worse – when there’s nothing at stake because we know the world won’t change, then like a sitcom there’s nothing thrilling, nothing exciting and certainly nothing emotional to invest in. All that remains are cod-portentous self-serious plots leavened with some (quite good) jokes.

Marvel has a problem and it’s not Ant-Man. It’s Marvel. The She-Hulk television series nailed this when it put on screen an imaginatively bankrupt robot as the creature in charge of all stories who was reduced to churning out the same tired cliches again and again and again.

So here we are.

What makes it worse is the talent involved in bringing us this mediocrity.

Michael Douglas, Jonathan Majors, William Jackson Harper, Evangeline Lilly and Michelle Pfeiffer. The cast is exceptionally talented and are given very little to do. Majors stands out as being a whirlwind of frustration, emotion and determination but otherwise it’s direction and writing that leaves very little time or space for anyone to do anything other than move us on to the next moment.

In other words it feels less like a movie (apart from the obligatory crash bang ending) and more like an episode in an ongoing sci-fi sitcom where no one changes from week to week.

For me this movie could have worked if we’d gotten the actual story – about Janet’s relationship with Kang, about Cassie’s reasonable frustrations with her father, about his willing ignorance towards suffering.

Scott comes into this film prepared to do anything to save his daughter. So much, so what. Yet no one ever asks him why he cares so much if, by standing aside from those who need help, the daughter he’s saved ends up living in the ruins created by his indifference.

There’s so much meat that’s left on the bones rather than served up to the audience that, just like with Eternals, I can’t help but wonder what the original script was before it got turned into just another Marvel movie.

It looks lovely for the most part but there’s nothing interesting about the world design. It’s all very imaginative in a parochial sense. From broccoli people to amoebas and living buildings it’s all so small (no pun intended) when an infinite quantum realm which doesn’t obey the laws of spacetime could have been radically more exciting and weird.

It’s like getting a book on quantum physics and discovering it’s The Ladybird Book of Quantum Mechanics for five-year-olds.

Lastly the music. There’s nothing memorable about it at all. Nothing you could talk about. It’s there, that’s about as much as you can say. It tells you what’s coming, tries to let you know what you should feel but beyond that it’s got nothing.

I was entertained enough. The cast have enough talent that even with the meagre meal they were serving up I laughed a couple of times and was eager to see more of Majors but beyond that it was profoundly mediocre.

Have I as an audience member moved on from Marvel? I don’t know. I look back at the last five movies and feel they were a mixed bunch but what’s missing is a sense that they’re going somewhere. That they offer more than connecting tissue to the next instalment.

The stories which provide the source material are often superb, they have meat and bone to them, substance and consequence. Marvel stories also suffer from the same problem of no one ever truly being dead, no one ever really suffering from the consequences of their actions.

I don’t know where we go from here. With Disney pulling back on spending like every other streaming producer, it’s hard to see the MCU surviving in the same form with the same extravagant budgets in the future. All my frustration may be moot if the juggernaut slows and fades away.

Verdict: Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania isn’t bad, it’s just not very good and, I think, almost all the fault lies not with those making this movie but with those sitting above them curating what it means to be a Marvel product.

The best extra for the home entertainment release is the commentary which explains some – but by means not all – of the creative decisions taken, and confirms how much the Kang element of the story overshadowed everything else  but this is only on the Blu-ray, which is a shame. If you have Disney+ access, then watch the movie on there (the IMAX sequences make that worthwhile) and then switch to the Blu-ray for the commentary – Paul Simpson

Rating? 5 conquerors of 10.

Stewart Hotston