“I wish that mattered, Janet.”

“You see, I’m both Bruce Wayne and Ba... “Just what I had in mind. Everything ...

“I wish that mattered, Janet.”

Alright, firstly I want to discuss a resolution that I’ve made. Like many movie critics (and after eleven years that still feels presumptuous to say, thank you imposter syndrome) I’ve noted that the CGI in Marvel’s recent output has been of inconsistent quality. This inevitably comes across as a criticism of the VFX artists who worked on these films, which is horribly unfair. As has become more and more clear in recent years, the problem is not with the artists but with Disney’s tendency to over-work their artists while micromanaging every visual aspect of their films to the point that the effects teams often have very little time to do their work to the standard they would ideally like. So, I’m no longer going to say “the CGI is shit” in these reviews. Instead I will say “the studio is shit”, just so we all know who’s really at fault here.

Will I have cause to make use of this new paradigm when reviewing Ant-Man 3?

Right now I feel about the Ant-Man series the way I feel about this mole on my back. It didn’t bother me at first and I was able to pretend it didn’t exist but the longer it hangs around and the bigger it gets the less I care for it.

The movie begins with a flashback to Janet living as a hermit in the Quantum realm. Little niggle, but does it bother anyone else when a character is stranded in the wilderness and turns into Bear Grylls crossed with a Minecraft player, able to hunt and craft weapons and furniture and make a tent that’s basically a nice suburban home? I dunno about you, but if I was suddenly cast into the quantum realm I’d be dead after three days with a half-chewed shoe in my mouth.

She goes to investigate and is attacked by some predators, only to be rescued by a mysterious man who asks her where he is. So this is Kang the Conqueror. Or is it? Who fucking knows? I hate Kang. Not Jonathan Majors’ performance, I think he’s quite good, I just hate the character in general.

I actually tried to do some research to refresh my knowledge of this character and I came across this, which is Kang’s complete history (as of 2018) done as a choose your own adventure novel. Which is at once brilliant, and also damning. And as I waded into the sea of Immortuses, Rama-Tuts, Iron-Lads and never-ending retcons I realised: I don’t care. I just don’t care. This is too much work to understand a character who is basically own-brand Doctor Doom.

He’s a time traveller. He wants to conquer everything. He runs on bullshit. Moving on.

In the present day, life is just peachy for Scott Lang. He’s a famous superhero, he’s just published a book, his girlfriend is a tech billionaire and he’s even started to age like a normal human being so he won’t outlive everyone he’s ever known and loved. However, he has to leave his own book reading when he gets a call from jail because his daughter Cassie has been arrested, presumably for being the worst.

No disrespect to Kathryn Newton (who I thought was great in Detective Pikachu) but Cassie Lang is the worst thing in this movie. And that is up against some stiff competition. In fact, let’s take a minute to take stock here.

Anyone remember Tony Stark? I don’t mean tech-messiah Tony Stark who died for our sins. I mean this guy.

That dude had problems. He was a deeply morally compromised man with massive personal failings. Now. Can you imagine Disney making a movie with a character like 2008 vintage Iron Man as the protagonist? I made a lot of noise in my review of the first Ant-Man movie that Disney seemed terrified of Scott Lang having actual flaws. Sure, he was an ex-con, but he was in jail for stealing from corrupt corporations. There was never a hint that he had ever caused anyone any kind of harm. Sure, his marriage fell apart but that was always presented as something Scott had to suffer, not something that he caused. It’s, “this guy fought the system, was punished, and now the cop who arrested him has swooped in and taken his wife and daughter from him. Poor guy.”

And this problem, this unwillingness to present Scott with any kind of real rough edges has rubbed off on Cassie Lang. She’s in jail after being arrested. But don’t worry, she was only arrested for championing the rights of the oppressed. And by the “oppressed” I mean, people who were made homeless by the Blip, not any real life groups, don’t worry we’re not getting political. And she is just…insufferable, rude and superior to everyone including her own father who, I remind you, played a central role in saving half of all life in the universe.

They go to dinner with the Awful, Awful Pyms and Hank reveals that he’s been doing secret Ant science with Cassie behind Scott’s back. Hank actually calls it “Ant Science” and I want to take this moment to say “hi and I’ll see you in court” to whoever it is in Marvel who reads this blog. You know my running gag portraying Hank Pym as a half-senile weirdo literally incapable of doing anything that does not somehow involve ants?

That dude is now CANON.

Also, Cassie is a science genius now.

She’s a champion of the oppressed activist science genius.

Jesus Christ, would the world end if any of these people were just fucking normal ordinary people?

So they show everyone what they’ve been working on, which is a machine that can establish contact with the quantum realm (using ants, obviously) and start broadcasting a message. Janet starts freaking out and tells them to shut the message off because she had no idea that Hank was working on this, I assume because they’ve stopped talking to each other whenever the kids aren’t visiting. Before she can shut it off, a portal opens and Janet, Scott, Cassie, Hope, Hank and a metric shit ton of ants get sucked into the quantum realm. Scott and Hope get seperated from the Awful, Awful Pyms so we have two teams now.

Your humble rodent has been ruminating on just why this movie utterly fails to elicit any kind of interest from me. And it’s not any one big thing. It’s just a lot of little things. And you can’t argue with the little things.

Firstly. I am so. Goddamned. Done with Disney’s obsession with Lost World stories.

You know the ones. Our heroes travel to a strange world, meet a few factions, pick up a comedy alien sidekick or three and end up saving the world. Shang-Chi, Frozen 2, Strange World, John Carter ENOUGH WITH THIS HACKNEYED PLOT.

Secondly, there is just a general mehness to everything. Writing, acting, the shitty studio, I really don’t feel a lot of heart in this one. Spoilers for a future review, but I saw Guardians 3 recently and there is just a different vibe when you can tell that the people making a movie loved what they were doing and cared.

And these aren’t really things that can be fixed. I mean, if I was asked to do a script pass on a movie titled “Quantumania” I don’t think my first note: “maybe they don’t go to the Quantum Realm?” would meet a warm reception. (Also, the title is terrible. “Quantumania” promises tongue in cheek, campy fun that this film is waaaaaay too square to pull off.)

BUT there is one big hairy problem that I think could have been fixed and made the movie better. And that’s changing the protagonist. There is one (count ’em) one, person in this thing whose story in this I actually find compelling.

Just do a Wasp movie. That’s it. That’s the note.

Here is a woman who’s returned from a long exile and finally managed to put back together the family she lost. But then the secrets from her past rise up to destroy all her hard-won happiness and she is pulled back into the war that she left behind, against a monster that she helped create. Also, I’d ditch Bill Murray’s character and have it that Janet and Kang were lovers instead, adding an element of betrayal and lovers to enemies. I mean, that sounds like a main character’s story to me, I dunno about you.

But instead, the movie keeps insisting that we focus on Scott and his relationship with Cassie because apparently we’re bad people and this is what we deserve. As well as just being annoying, this also means that the movie has the same problem as Princess and the Frog, the central conflict is between the antagonist and a supporting character, leaving the protagonist feeling superflous in their own movie.

Cassie and Scott are captured by a ragtag group of rebels led by a generic warrior woman alien named Jentorra and Chidi from The Good Place. The character has a real name, but I’d rather be thinking about The Good Place than Ant-Man 3.

“This is worse. You get how this is worse?”

They feed Scott and Cassie some juice from a talking creature named Veb and that allows them to speak the local language (it’s always drinking weird goo, have you noticed that? Same in John Carter). The aliens freak out when the Langs mention Janet because apparently it’s her fault that their world went to hell.

Meanwhile, the Awful, Awful Pyms meet Lord Krylar, a former revolutionary and also lover of Jan’s, played by Bill Murray in pure “Ghostbusters 2016″ cash-in mode. That said, he does get my favourite line in this whole thing.

Krylar: Human, that’s the word. Totally forgot what you call yourselves up there. Human.

Hank Pym: Are you not human?

Krylar: Not technically, but yes. In the ways that matter.

Anyway, Krylar pulls a Lando and reveals that he’s actually working for Kang and Kang’s stormtroopers arrive. There’s a bit of a kerfuffle and the Awful, Awful Pyms escape in a flying craft that Hank has to pilot by double fisting it.

While that’s happening, the alien resistance camp gets attacked by Kang’s troops led by his henchman M.O.D.O.K. Scott and Cassie are horrified to learn that M.O.D.O.K. is in fact the MCU’s greatest villain, DARREN CROSS! YES! CROSS IS BACK BABY! MARVEL HEARD YOUR CRIES, YE CROSS-MAD FANATICS AND YOUR FAITH HAS BEEN REWARDED! DARREN CROSS IS BACK, STRAIGHT FROM THE UNCANNY VALLEY TO RULE OVER YOUR NIGHTMARES!

God the studio fucking sucks.

I mean, if they were going to bring back any Ant-Man villain I guess it had to be him, if for no other reason that I literally couldn’t remember who the villain in Ant-Man 2 was and almost gaslit myself into thinking it was Jimmy Woo. But this still feels like a massive misstep, and not just because the studio is so shitty (although, JESUS CHRIST how did this get released in this state?). M.O.D.O.K. is one of the nuttiest, goofiest, downright funnest Marvel villains and merging him with Darren Cross of all fucking characters is just bizarre.

Anyway, they’re captured and brought before Kang. So, here are my thoughts on Kang. I think, in a vacuum, this is a pretty good villain. Johnathan Majors has undeniable presence and you definitely get the feeling that he’s an unstable and dangerous dude. In the role of Kang. What did you think I meant?

As is befitting an actor playing Kang, the timeline is long, convoluted and not fun to read.

And yet, the very conception of the character; big, brooding, saturnine, soft spoken with flashes of rage and melancholy can’t help but feel a little…familiar.

I feel like Kang is just too close to being Thanos-lite.

The Awful, Awful Pyms race to Kang’s citadel to rescue the Langs and Janet finally tells Hank and Hope what this dude’s deal is. See, Kang crash landed near Janet’s camp and the two formed a bond. They worked together to repair his ship so that she could return home to her family which she wanted to do for reasons the script leaves ambiguous. But, when Janet touched the telepathically operated ship she saw into Kang’s mind and realised that he’s a bad ‘un, possibly the worst ‘un in the whole multiverse. So she blew up the ship and fled. However, the ship’s core is still intact in the centre of a temporally frozen explosion. And Kang has built his entire empire just to have the resources necessary to recover it. And he wants to do that because he claims that there’s an army of alternate versions of him who are coming to destroy the multiverse. All cool? Okay.

So in his citadel, Kang threatens to kill Cassie unless Scott helps him.

But Scott agrees and shrinks down into the quantum realm where matter exists in all possible states (wait, I thought he was already in the quantum realm). Anyway, Scott’s probabilities start multiplying and soon he’s in a sea of infinite Scott Langs, including one who never became Ant-Man and stayed working at Baskin Robbin’s. Which would mean that there is one timeline where Scott was able to keep his criminal record a secret which of course is IMPOSSIBLE BECAUSE BASKIN ROBBIN’S ALWAYS FINDS OUT!!

Kill the Skrull!

Pretty soon there’s just waaaaay too many Scott Lang’s but hope arrives in the form of…Hope who follows after Scott. A radio message from Cassie convinces all the Scott’s to work together and they form a massive quivering phallus of sweaty man bodies that gets longer and longer…

Hope arrives and helps him shrink down the core. They return to normal size…I mean, they return to the impossibly tiny size they were before they shrunk to an even more impossibly tiny size and Kang appears and demands the core. Scott demands to know where Cassie is and then Kang reneges on the deal, shoots Hank’s ship down, knocks Scott and Hope out but leaves them alive and then peaces out with Janet.

How…simultaneously dickish and merciful. Also, the fact that Kang would willingly spend more time with Cassie is what finally broke my suspension of disbelief.

So Kang brings Janet back to his citadel and gives her the standard supervillain monologue. There’s a little “I shall have my revenge” with some oakey notes of “I’m the only one who sees”. Boiled down, he lost a war against the other Kangs and now he’s going to wipe out the multiverse to kill them all.

None shall be spared.

Again, this comes across as Thanos but worse. Thanos’ goals were at least interesting in their motivation. Kang just wants revenge, which is not a terrible motivation for a villain but it’s also quite basic. The stakes of wiping out the multiverse are also just too grandiose to feel much investment in. With Thanos, sure we’re hoping our heroes will save half of all life in the universe in general, but in particular we’re hoping that they’ll be able to bring back Black Panther, Peter Parker and all of our sweet baby boys who were taken too soon. And lastly, I can’t get past the fact that our heroes are trying to save the multiverse from a tiny, tiny, tiny, little man.

Scott and Hope are rescued by Hank, who was found by a civilization of super-advanced ants who are the descendants of Hank’s ants and who now basically worship him as their ant God.

The meme has ascended.

In the citadel, Cassie escapes and frees Jentorra and they free the other captured rebels and start a rebellion in the citadel. Scott, Hank and Hope arrive with a metric shit ton of cybernetically enhanced ants. There’s a big fight and M.O.D.O.K. switches sides after Cassie tells him not to be a dick and apparently that’s all it took. He then dies (quite horribly).

Scott and Kang have a big fight where Scott yells at Kang for lying to him about releasing Cassie and you can almost smell the movie sweating as it tries to force some kind of believable antagonism between these two characters. I mean, c’mon Scott, of course the supervillain who took your daughter hostage was untrustworthy. If you’re really that hurt by this betrayal then, I’m sorry, you were reading something into the relationship that simply wasn’t there.

Clear communication. Honesty about expectations. It’s so important.

Kang is seemingly killed (by ants). I read a theory online that Hank’s ants are going to become the MCUs version of the Annihilation Wave which would honestly be hilarious. There’s finally a continuity where Hank Pym isn’t most famous for creating Ultron and instead he becomes the creator of Annihilus. That would be, truly, the most Hank Pym thing ever.

Janet opens a portal back to their world and Cassie and the Awful, Awful Pyms return home. Scott is about to follow but, surprise!, Kang was only pretending. Kang beats the snott out of Scott but Hope comes back because she needs something to do in this and she is technically our second title character. They seemingly kill Kang by sucking him into the core and return home.

Scott plans a birthday party for Cassie and then remembers what Kang said about needing him to fight off the encroaching army of Kangs and he suddenly realises that the entire MCU is in terrible peril.

“Oh God! Three duds in a row and James Gunn is leaving!”

***

I don’t hate this one as much as Love and Thunder but that’s about as effusive as my praise for this gets.

Scoring

Adaptation: 07/25

Rote, bland, by the numbers.

Our Heroic Heroes: 08/25

Paul Rudd is never not welcome but Scott really feels disconnected from the movie he’s supposedly the star of. Hope honestly could be cut and little would be lost.

Our Nefarious Villain: 12/25

I dunno. I mean, he could work. I thought Thanos was crap when he was introduced and look how that turned out.

Our Plucky Sidekicks: 05/25

Piñing for Peña.

The Stinger

In a cosmic football stadium, Immortus, Rama-Tut and…I dunno, some other Kang, talk vaguely about doing something to protect the multiverse. I got real Countdown vibes (if you know, you know). We then see that the stadium is full of Kangs. It’s Kangs all the way down. Kangapalooza.

And the audience went…

The Second Stinger

Loki and Mobius sit in a darkened auditorium as YET ANOTHER KANG gives a demonstration to the crowd. Mobius says he doesn’t seem threatening but Loki assures him that he is so I guess he’s threatening.

And the audience went…