Film as enjoyable as ants at a picnic
Paul Rudd must really be as nice as he looks. He agreed to appear in “Ant-man and the Wasp: Quantumania,” despite a story that pushes him to the margins and a script that doesn’t play to his strengths.
Remember how Ant-man was the funny superhero? Remember how this was the superhero franchise that appealed even to people who don’t like superhero franchises?
Forget all that. “Ant-man: Quantumania” is a glum, tiresome exercise that follows the pattern of every run-of-themill superhero movie ever made. There’s a villain. He’s unconquerable. He’s going to destroy everything. But, somehow, after a lot of bright orange explosions that look like something on a computer screen … well, you can guess the rest.
The movie has two good, dramatic performances by Jonathan Majors and Michelle Pfeiffer, but neither of them have anything to do with Rudd’s easy charm and flair for comedy. Rudd’s scenes are mostly played opposite Kathryn Newton, as Ant-man’s teenage daughter, Cassie.
In the movie’s opening minutes, Cassie almost gets the entire family killed by accidentally getting them all dragged into the bubbling red Quantum Realm. Cassie is clearly an imbecile, but since it’s a rule of superhero movies, and of American movies in general, that teenagers can never be wrong, this is never
acknowledged. Instead, most of Rudd’s performance consists of his looking at Newton lovingly and calling her “peanut,” while she tells him off for no good reason.
The real star of this movie is Pfeiffer — and that’s a wonderful thing to be able to say in 2023 — yet her stardom here comes tinged with frustration. This is one of the greatest and most colossally underrated screen actresses of our time, but there are no showcases being written for her talent. As Janet, she’s just a cog in this movie’s machine, a jewel in a pile of garbage.
In an early scene, Cassie shows off a device she has
invented that can send signals to the Quantum Realm. As Janet watches this young idiot, she tenses and a look crosses her face, edgy, full of unspoken trauma. It’s a look we remember from much better movies: Something bad is going to happen, and there’s no way to stop it.
Thanks to Cassie, “Quantumania” takes place in a green screen world where beleaguered tribes are in a protracted and losing battle against a guy who calls himself Kang the Conqueror. A name like that should have been a red flag, but it turns out that this is someone Janet knew back in the day.
The flashback to Kang (Majors) and Janet’s past is the only living portion of the movie. Both are stuck in the Quantum Realm and want to get out, so they work together on an escape plan. What Janet only later discovers is that Kang, who seems nice enough, is actually a force of destruction, existing outside time, who wants to destroy planets and timelines.
That’s sci-fi silliness, but Pfeiffer dignifies it with real human emotions. She doesn’t play the absurdity of “my friend wants to kill planets” but rather “my best friend turns out to be evil, and I have to stop him.” And Majors
dignifies it, too, finding a fascinating mental throughline for Kang: He’s weary. He has seen everything, and he knows that nothing lasts and nothing matters.
But there’s only so much goodwill that a movie can buy with a well-acted 10-minute segment. Throw in a single comic interlude (a famous screen comedian plays one of Janet’s ex-lovers), and you have 15 minutes of pleasure scattered over a 125-minute wasteland.
Here and there, screenwriter Jeff Loveness, remembering that he’s writing an “Ant-man” movie, will throw in a halfhearted joke, but it doesn’t belong and only seems jarring.
“Ant-man” isn’t an example of bad comedy. It’s bad drama, bad science fiction, and a waste of everyone in it, including Evangeline Lily and Michael Douglas (yes, he’s back, too).
The case of Lilly is particularly hilarious, in that her character’s name is in the title, but she does nothing in the movie except stand next to Rudd, who’s also doing nothing.
Running time: 2 hours 5 minutes
Rating: PG-13 (violence, action, language)