By Luis Diaz
“Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania” proves Marvel is slowly losing the magic touch they’ve become known for over the last 10 years.
The movie suffers from predictability and lacks the action-packed Avengers level threat promised by marketing.
Marvel really creates a Star Wars world in this movie.
Scott Lang, played by Paul Rudd, has written a memoir about his life as a superhero. His book shows how his life changed from thieving to becoming an Avenger.
This movie begins Marvel’s next phase of films or like the company calls it, phase five.
This causes the movie to fail to identify it as an “Ant-Man” film. Marvel tries to use this film to set up everything leading up to “Avengers: The Kang Dynasty.”
Kang the Conqueror, played by Jonathan Majors, is brilliant casting, but does not perform well as the main villain of this film.
Majors is hardly in action and is just seen walking around and mumbling dialogue, which at times is hard to hear.
The audience might be confused as to why he does not impose a threat because he isn’t developed to his full potential.
The film does have its moments where it works well, but that’s barely enough to say the film is good – it’s decent at most.
The movie feels generic and Marvel is starting to show its repetitiveness; the audience can see where the story is headed within the first hour.
The character, Mental Organism Designed Only For Killing (M.O.D.O.K.), from the first Ant-Man returns in this third entry, but was just pointless to mix into an already messy movie. Darren Cross, played by Cory Stroll, isn’t given justice as one of the smartest villains in the whole Marvel comics lineup.
M.O.D.O.K. suffers from the same problem Kang the Conqueror suffers. Neither pose any real threat.
Marvel has lost it’s touch with what made their cinematic universe so special.
The last half hour of the movie is the best part of the entire film, but the lead up is boring.
Toward the end of the film Kang becomes a real threat. It’s shocking to waste two hours for the end to show what a villain Kang can be.
The Avengers have lost before but it feels like this time around, the defeat will be much worse than losing Iron Man.
It’s hard to decide wether to take this movie as a joke or not. Unfortunately, deciding that so early in Marvel’s phase five is hard to do.
The humor is there like every other “Ant-Man” movie, but it feels like that should have been left out of this movie. The film was described as an Avengers-level movie with high stakes.
“Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania” falls hard on its face because it lacks focus on Ant-Man.
Marvel’s focus is on setting up the future rather than being in the present.
That backfires because the main villain does not pose a threat and the audience might find it hard to even care about the character. The last 30 minutes of film only slightly redeems the character.
Marvel’s biggest issue is pushing out too much content. Maybe they will learn from their mistakes.
Marvel will need to show that it still has the magic touch for superhero movies with the release of “Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3” to ensure that audiences don’t have superhero movie fatigue.