Better Never Than Late on "Ant-Man and The Wasp: Quantumania"
I'm about to go on another vacation, but this one will be a full, real vacation for me. I am going to Mexico, to an adults only resort, with my wife. That means no writing from Tuesday to Friday. But I did want to leave you all with one more movie review before flying off for a week. I'm sure RD will do stuff, I told him to put up some of my older stuff if he wanted to, but I wanted to do one more before taking some time away.
Over the weekend we did date night and it was my wife's turn to pick the movie. She is very much into Marvel and superhero movies, so she picked "Ant-Man: Quantamania". She was trying to decide between a few, and this one was next in order for how we have watched the MCU movies. I had heard some reviews for this prior to watching. Some were okay, some were not so okay. I figured it was going to be good because I am a big Paul Rudd fan, and the first "Ant-Man" movie was shockingly great. Hell, I even enjoyed the sequel.
Unfortunately this one did not meet my expectations. I was pretty bummed out with this viewing. I expected so much more, but the movie did not fully deliver, at least for me. The movie was almost devoid of the humor that the first one put out there so expertly. The second one even had humorous elements. But this one, outside of MODOK, was not very funny. I felt like they totally underused Paul Rudd's excellent comedic timing. Michael Pena and TI were not even in the movie. The villain was completely humorous. His family was not funny at all. This movie took itself way, way too seriously. Except MODOK. I actually enjoyed MODOK the most in this movie. He was the only one who seemed to realize they were making a multiverse movie within the Ant-Man world. All of these superhero movies are wild, but Ant-Man may be the oddest of them all. MODOK got it, no one else did though. Paul Rudd seemed like he had very little to do in this movie that he is supposed to be the star of. He had moments, he got to show his skills, but it was few and far between. His acting missed the mark. Wasp was barely used as well. She didn't do much and wasn't asked to do much. Bill Murray showed up for one scene. It was fine, but there could have been more. Michael Douglass and Michelle Pfieffer had bigger parts, especially Pfieffer, but they seemed aloof. Pfieffer seemed more like the main character, but she held little weight. They did use Ant-Man's daughter more in this movie, but it felt like a not as good "Hawkeye" passing of the torch. The "Hawkeye" tv series did a much better job going from Jeremey Renner to Hailee Steinfeld than this movie did with Rudd and the actor playing his daughter. It felt rushed.
Then we have Johnathan Majors as Kang. For as great as he was in "Loki", he was chewing scenery far too much here. I think he was undercut by his own horrific offscreen allegations that came out after this movie, but his performance would have been too much even if that never came out. He was too big and over acting. It felt like every scene was a monologue and Majors was trying to show how great of an actor he can be. It did not fit in this movie for me. At all.
I will say, the scenery was cool. I liked the way it looked. But the acting, the dialogue, the story, it was a miss for me. I found myself bored and annoyed at the same time. I wanted this movie to be as fun as other Marvel movies I truly like. That never happened. I think the whole idea of multiverses is already over done and overplayed. It is too much. There are too many things they can simply bring back just by saying they were in a different universe. That was what they did with MODOK. It felt cheap.
Oh well, they cannot all be winners for me I guess. But "Quantamania" really missed the mark in my opinion. I'd recommend skipping it, unless you're a completionist.
Ty
Ty is the Pop Culture editor for SeedSing and the other host of the X Millennial Man Podcast.
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