The Spoiler Review: Ant-Man And The Wasp: Quantumania

While the highlights of Ant-Man and The Wasp: Quantumania were strong enough for me to forget the nagging feeling that poked at the edge of my mind during most of the movie, those concerning feelings almost never stopped. It wasn’t until I looked up the background of Jeff Loveness, the sole credited writer of the movie (aside from Jack Kirby, of course), that it gelled for me — Loveness most recently was a writer on Rick and Morty.

Below I will lay out how that was a problem for the movie, with full spoilers. So, if you haven’t seen Ant-Man and The Wasp: Quantumania and don’t want to read spoilers, don’t continue past the break. And going forward, like in our spoiler-free review from last week, I’ll condense the title of the movie to simply Quantumania.

First off, Loveness wrote some really solid elements in Quantumania. While Jonathan Majors’ performance is what makes Kang really stand out, Loveness wrote some great villain lines and moments for Majors to bite into. And Paul Rudd’s Scott Lang is given his most serious, emotional lines in the franchise, which Rudd delivers in what is his best Ant-Man performance to date. Overall, the serious, tension-filled moments of the movie are written and performed as solid MCU work — better than Thor: The Dark World but not at the level of Captain America: Civil War.

Unfortunately, that quality character writing ends with a hard crash at Janet van Dyne. To be clear, Michelle Pfeiffer does a bang-up job with what she is given, but Janet does something completely out of character for how she is otherwise written in the rest of Quantumania. Janet is the most pragmatic of all the cast members in every other aspect of her story, until it gets to talking about Kang. Her family is suddenly facing the greatest danger she’s ever known, and instead of being proactive as she was in literally every other challenge in front of her, she refuses to tell them about the source of the danger.

This is done solely to create a greater sense of mystery around Kang, and it could have been accomplished by having Janet appear somewhere so removed from the rest of the family she simply can’t warn them, instead of choosing not to. I know I harp on this point a lot, but having a character do something opposite of their character as portrayed in every other moment of your written work just to create or enhance tension and mystery is lazy. And we notice it.

Once you get outside the core of Scott, Kang, Hank (Michael Douglas), Cassie (Kathryn Newton), Janet and the again mostly useless Hope (Evangeline Lily), nearly all other characters are very obviously Rick and Morty characters stuck in an Ant-Man movie. The actors generally do a good job, particularly Katy M. O’Brian as Jentorra and David Dastmalchian as the purple goo creature Veb. But Veb, Bill Murray’s Lord Krylar, Xolum, Broccoli Man, and almost all of the weird unnamed denizens of the Quantum Realm would be right at home in any Rick and Morty episode.

Big Head Darren and the Monsters
That leads to the biggest change in Quantumania from the previous two movies. Nearly all of the humor looks, sounds and feels like Rick and Morty humor, not Ant-Man humor. When Kang isn’t on screen showing off why he is such a dangerous threat to the entire MCU, Quantumania feels like watching a multi-episode Rick and Morty arc. And the worst example of this is what they did with M.O.D.O.K.

When a few months ago sharp-eyed viewers zoomed in on the most recent trailer and saw that M.O.D.O.K. looked a lot like Corey Stoll from the first Ant-Man movie, I thought it was a smart move. After all, Darren Cross/Yellowjacket’s demise in that movie had him shrinking down (collapsing in on himself) until he disappeared. It would make sense and be a great call back to have him return in the only movie that almost fully takes place in the Quantum Realm. Then I saw what they did with the special effects and how they wrote his character. The effects are almost childishly bad whenever Stoll’s face is shown as a bloated face, not M.O.D.O.K.’s giant head. And his character is just a joke villain.

If he is really dead as it seems in the run-up to the big conclusion of Quantumania, Marvel Studios just wasted one of the best, most bizarrely evil characters in the comics, just for comic relief. The first two Captain America movies treated a less important character in the comics, Arnim Zola, with much greater importance and dignity. Shame on the otherwise infallible Kevin Feige for letting Loveness and director Peyton Reed do that to M.O.D.O.K.

I get why it seemed to make sense to hire Loveness to write a multiverse movie. After all, Rick Sanchez is basically Kang. A genius, high-tech, multiverse hopping sociopath who is constantly running afoul of a council made up of multiversal variants of himself. Who did I just describe, Rick or Kang? Now that I think about it, it seems as though Rick was modelled deliberately after Kang and had Kang’s murderous psychopath behavior moderated down to just dangerous sociopath levels.

But the MCU isn’t Adult Swim, and Kang isn’t a comedic character. If not for Majors’ extreme talent and high charisma, this first full appearance of villainous Kang the Conqueror could have been a complete brick wall for all of the next phases in the MCU. My real worry here is that this Kang is actually dead, and with the appearance of the Council of Kangs in the credits scene, we will get a series of movies in which various MCU heroes defeat variants of Kang. And that will make him such a weaker threat compared to Thanos, that all of the buildup with the Infinity Stones as paperweights from Loki and the power to completely destroy entire universes was wasted.

I now kind of wish I got to see a live action Rick & Morty movie with an MCU budget, instead of a Rick & Morty movie disguised as an Ant-Man movie. Overall, I stand with our spoiler-free review rating — a 3 out of 5. But if it was a tighter Ant-Man movie, or an actual Rick & Morty movie, it could have been so much better.

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