I feel I should start with an apology, because I wrote and scheduled my "Creed III" review before the news of Jonathan Majors' arrest came out, and promptly forgot about it. This is one of the most dizzying reversals of fortune for a rising star that I've ever seen. Just after Majors had two different films top the box office in successive weeks in February, he was arrested for assault. Now multiple films are potentially in limbo, including the entire current slate of the MCU, which is built around the threat of Majors' villain, Kang the Conqueror.
"Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania," for instance, is almost entirely built around introducing and promoting Kang as a threat. There's not much of a plot otherwise. Scott Lang, like Adonis Creed, is enjoying fame and fortune, and everything seems to have worked out for him. He's written his memoirs, he's still together with Hope, and his daughter Cassie (Kathryn Newton) is now following in his footsteps - maybe a little too closely, as she gets herself arrested for political activism (and shrinking a cop car) in the opening act. This might be an interesting topic to explore, but instead the two of them and the Pym/Van Dynes - Hope, Hank, and Janet - are accidentally pulled down into the Quantum Realm, and spend the rest of the movie trying to get home again.
If you remember the previous Ant-Man movies, Janet van Dyne was stuck in the Quantum Realm for decades. We learn that she briefly befriended Kang, an exiled multiverse-hopper, who she learned was an evil conqueror. Still trapped in the Quantum Realm, Kang has been busy subjugating the folks who live there and looking for a way to escape. The Quantum Realm is essentially like an alien planet, full of strange creatures like the sentient slime Veb (David Dastmalchian), a guy with a flashlight for a head, Xolum (James Cutler), a telepath named Quaz (William Jefferson Harper), and your garden variety badass freedom fighters like Jentorra (Katy O'Brien). Corey Stoll's villain from the first "Ant-Man" is back, but now transformed into a crazed, mutated cyborg named MODOK. And for some reason Bill Murray also shows up for exactly one scene.
If this sounds like a random mess, it's because this is a random mess. Ant-Man has been good for comic relief in the MCU crossovers, but the last "Ant-man" film was among the weakest in the entire franchise, and "Quantumania" is at about the same level. The change of scenery is nice, but all the interesting minor characters from the previous films have been jettisoned, so that Scott Lang and friends can go have a more cartoonish sci-fi adventure, with monsters and spaceships and big fights with too much CGI. The size-changing schtick is so much less effective here, where everyone else is doing similarly impossible things, and there's no normal, mundane, everyday environment to contrast with. Hope is still woefully short on screen time and personality, such that the "Wasp" in the title should probably refer to her mother Janet, who has far more to do. Aging up Cassie is a good idea, and Kathryn Newton delivers good snark, but like Hope she just doesn't get enough attention.
At least Jonathan Majors as Kang feels appropriately menacing, but we may not be seeing more of him. So much of "Quantumania" is about building Kang up as a threat, and filling in parts of his backstory, so the movie is really more of a prequel to future "Avengers" films than anything else. I expect that he'll end up being recast, because the rules of the MCU are so fluid that hardly anything feels like it has much weight or substance anymore. "Quantumania" is full of pretty colors, shaped into a strange realm where buildings are sentient, Bill Murray is boring, and somebody thought that a live action MODOK was a good idea. Swapping Majors out for a different actor feels positively pedestrian.
I'm being unfair. "Ant-man and the Wasp: Quantumania" is not an especially bad superhero movie. Hundreds of people put in a lot of time and effort to make this, and occasionally there's a good joke or a clever line or an especially weird Quantum Realm creature that deserves some admiration. However, it bothers me immensely that "Quantumania" tried to do something different, and ended up just making a clone of a "Guardians of the Galaxy" film with more tepid characters. The MCU has been stuck idling for far too long, and had better find the gas pedal soon.
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