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ANT-MAN AND THE WASP: QUANTUMANIA 12A ★★
We’re now 31 films and 20 TV spin-offs into the Marvel Cinematic Universe, and, as with Jurgen Klopp’s Liverpool, it’s all beginning to feel a bit stale.
The third instalment with Ant-man in the title is supposed to freshen up the attack by introducing a new “Big Bad” ahead of the next raft of movies, shows and duvet sets.
This is Kang the Conqueror, a multidimensional mass murderer who briefly appeared at the end of the Disney+ series Loki. He doesn’t make a jot of sense, but a committed turn from Jonathan Majors suggests “Phase Five” of the franchise will orbit around a very soulful villain.
“If only they mattered,” sighs Majors’s Kang when accused of wiping out billions of innocent lifeforms by destroying whole universes. Sadly, the plot isn’t quite so memorable.
The film offers a deep dive into the franchise’s Quantum Realm, “a place beyond time and space, a secret universe beneath ours”, as Michael Douglas’s Hank Pym helpfully reminds us.
Ant-man (Paul Rudd); his partner The Wasp (Evangeline Lilly); his 18-year-old daughter Cassie (Kathryn Newton) and the in-laws (Douglas and Michelle Pfieffer) are transported there with their size-shifting suits after stupidly gathering round an experimental probe. They land in a Cgi-heavy world that completely fails to live up to its surreal billing.
We get weird-looking aliens, (some reptilian, some fish-faced, one resembling broccoli), a gang of plucky resistance fighters and even a Star Wars cantina. After a quirky introduction it gets a bit Babylon 5.
There are some nifty set-pieces where our heroes turn either really big or really small while battling Kang’s brittle, wonky-shooting stormtroopers.
But the plot is painfully formulaic, the dialogue is surprisingly flat and the stakes are crushingly low.
‘‘ They land in a Cgi-heavy world that fails to live up to its surreal billing