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It’s time for another Marvel movie, and I guess it’s Ant-Man’s turn. Let’s welcome back the tiny superhero whose main superpower is Paul Rudd’s outsize charm, and whose main weakness is that everybody’s always belittling him — even the creators of his own movie.
Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania is in theaters now. It’s a breezy, bizarro sci-fi adventure in the mold of Thor: Ragnarok, as familiar faces from the Marvel roster drop into an alien realm for fun and fighting before inspiring the locals to rise up and overthrow a hateful dictator. It also has a bigger significance for dedicated fans, introducing the Marvel Cinematic Universe’s major new villain Kang, played by Jonathan Majors.
Having rescued Janet van Dyne from the quantum realm in the previous Ant-Man and the Wasp film (and you’d be forgiven for remembering basically nothing about that movie), the Ant-gang is sucked back into the itty-bitty universe layered below the atoms of our full-size world. Returning director Peyton Reed again recruits Evangeline Lilly as Hope van Dyne, with Michelle Pfeiffer and Michael Douglas as her parents Hank and Janet. Kathryn Newton plays the now-teenaged Cassie Lang, Scott’s daughter, and in the quantum realm they encounter William Jackson Harper, Katy O’Brian and Bill Murray (yes, that Bill Murray).
It’s funny to think Ant-Man’s story began back in 2015 with a movie that was basically a heist with a final showdown in a child’s bedroom. By this third film, the action has scaled up to the microscopic yet larger-than-life quantum realm, a subatomic CG domain of impossible skies populated by insect-inspired critters, talking ooze-creatures and dudes with lightbulbs for heads. The weirdness of the micro-Mad Max setting gives rise to some entertaining jokes, arresting visuals and one or two mind-bending set pieces.
