Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania Review

The Ant-Man films worked because they were small. This one abandons that immediately, dropping the entire family into a subatomic realm rendered as a weightless digital backdrop where nothing has mass and no location is memorable, and the result is a picture with no ground to stand on. Every frame looks unfinished, the product of an effects pipeline crushed under the studio's release schedule, and the cast spend the runtime reacting to tennis balls on sticks.

Jonathan Majors is the one real asset, playing a conqueror as a quiet exhausted despot in a whisper rather than a roar, and his single scene alone with Paul Rudd is worth more than the rest of the film combined. Michelle Pfeiffer finally receives a backstory and it is delivered almost entirely as exposition. Kathryn Newton is stuck with a written on the nose activist daughter. Bill Murray turns up for one scene and evaporates. The floating head villain is a joke that does not survive its own reveal. It ends on a swarm of ants and an anticlimax, and it took a franchise's tone down with it.