Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania (2023)

Director: Peyton Reed

Cast: Paul Rudd, Evangeline Lilly, Jonathan Majors, Michelle Pfeiffer

Have I Seen it Before: Na.

Did I Like It: As a reframed high-pulp adventure with its protagonist and beating heart being a gender-swapped Obi-Wan Kenobi played by Michelle Pfeiffer, this third Ant-Man and thirty-first MCU film is exactly what I could want from two hours worth of diversion.

Sadly, though, this nearly perfect pitch for a movie only makes up at best half of the runtime presented. Even in those scenes where Pfeiffer reigns supreme, I don’t think I’ve yet to see a star more bored with the movie around him than Michael Douglas here. It’s to his credit that I couldn’t help but share in his boredom. Pfeiffer is game, but every utterance and gesture from Douglas screams “contractual obligation.”

Elsewhere, things don’t fare any better. Paul Rudd has never—even from his first appearance in Halloween: The Curse of Michael Myers (1995)—been anything other than a perfectly pleasant screen presence, and he has always brought the right amount of levity to Ant-Man. This is not a typical case of miscasting. But Ant-Man does feel like the wrong character to usher in this new era of Marvel movies. He is forced to look earnest as Kang (Majors) foreshadows things to come and kicks the shit out of him (anyone else really looking forward to Creed III, regardless of whether or not a Stallone-less Rocky movie feels like a shaky idea?). There are very few jokes. Certainly fewer than either of the two previous Ant-Man films. Luis is nowhere to be found. The filmmakers have explained that he didn’t fit into the story, and they are probably right. I think that says more about how much, again, this is the wrong story for Ant-Man.

But other films in the series have been weighed down by the burden of having to set up the larger story of that phase. Iron Man 2 (2010) and Avengers: Age of Ultron (2015) immediately come to mind. And yet, here, I am underwhelmed. I’ve missed most of the movies released post-Avengers: Endgame (2019). I honestly wouldn’t have made a point to see this film if I didn’t have an oil change running and a couple of hours to kill. I even left the theater before any tag scene started*. These films aren’t surprisingly delightful anymore. Marvel will somehow have to get back that feeling if they are going to keep their dominance over the multiplexes.

*I had to pee. I checked wikipedia to see what the tag scenes were, and were more than fine missing them.

Ant-Man (2015)

Director: Peyton Reed

Cast: Paul Rudd, Evangeline Lilly, Corey Stoll, Michael Douglas

Have I Seen it Before: Oddly enough, this is the only Marvel movie so far that I somehow missed at the theater, although I have since caught in on DVD.

Did I Like It: Ok. So, here’s the thing.

It is ultimately unfair to judge a film through the prism of what it was during pre-production or its earliest development. David Lynch’s Return of the Jedi. Tim Burton’s Batman Forever. Patty Jenkins’ Thor: The Dark World*. And at the same time, it is hard to watch the final result and not think about the potential abdicated.

So, too is it with this movie. Edgar Wright had been attached to direct throughout pre-production, but eventually dropped out of the project, citing creative differences with Marvel. The resulting film directed by Peyton Reed is at the disadvantage. One wants to imagine what the film could have been under Wright, and determine that any flaws (like the protracted training sequence that plays like a cut scene from a video game tutorial) are a result of the studio interference.

It’s a lively comedy when judged within its own context, with just enough a caper feel to it to differentiate it from the rest of the Marvel oeuvre. It is largely buoyed by the undeniably engaging presence of Rudd in the lead role, and remnants of Wright’s influence on the film (he retains an Executive Producer and writing credit). Which I think is one of the better realities about our sometimes over-produced blockbuster system. So much of the work is done in the pre-production that the resulting film can never fully pull away from a vision about which the studio might have had second thoughts.

*Although, to be fair, had any of those auteurs actually made the films in question, it is reasonable to assume that the world wouldn’t have been that dark, Jedi might not quite return, and Batman would be finite in the temporal sense.

Ant-Man and the Wasp (2018)

Director: Peyton Reed

Cast: Paul Rudd, Evangeline Lilly, Michael Douglas, Michelle Pfeiffer

Have I Seen it Before: Yep.

Did I Like It: It’s the Marvel movies that are the least burdened by setting up Bigger And Better Things™ and instead content to be a movie. This could have been weighed down by the task of providing the missing link between the hopelessness of Avengers: Infinity War (2018) and what—at the time of this writing—is the hopeful rebound of Avengers: Endgame (2019. Instead whatever place-setting obligations the film has is largely relegated to the post-credits scenes where they belong.

Thus the film operates as a diverting extended comic chase sequence with plenty of sci-fi weirdness gobbledegook. It is about as perfect an example of counter-programing to the aforementioned Infinity War as one is likely to see.

And still, I wonder how the film and the series would be different if Edgar Wright had gotten to direct the movie he wanted to way back when.

I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again. CGI de-aging is getting good. Scary good. Whereas Patrick Stewart and Ian McKellan tried to take the 80s by storm in X-Men: The Last Stand (2006), the technology seemed so pointedly stupid that I couldn’t fathom why filmmakers kept coming back to it. Now, I’ve traded in my request for a Batman Beyond film for a hope that Warner Bros. can just get their act together and give as the third Michael Keaton Batman film we all deserved. This film practically has a proof-of-concept for such a dream film in the performance of the hypnotic-at-any-age Michelle Pfeiffer. Hell, Pfeiffer could play 90s era Pfeiffer without CGI de-aging. But that statement may have more to do with my chronic 90s nostalgia madness. 

Oddly enough, it’s some of the scenes where Lang has to interact with a slightly larger world that—while funny—don’t work as brilliantly on the special effects side of things. Not all special effects are perfect, and even fewer advance along the quantum leaps (see what I did there?) of the CGI de-aging process.