Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania review: It's a small world after all

He is the mini of the multiverse, the littlest man on Marvel's campus. And a lot of Ant-Man's charm when the character first debuted in his own standalone movie in 2015 was in fact the human scale of the story: a blithe, goofy comedy that just happened to have superhero stuff in it (and of course, the deathless dimples of Paul Rudd).

Director Peyton Reed's antic 2018 followup, Ant-Man and the Wasp, went bigger and busier (and ultimately duller), as sequels do. Both the trailer and the subtitle of the third installment, Quantumania (in theaters this Friday), pretty much give the game away: Small has gone psychedelic, a flamboyant alloy of analog Old Hollywood (Bill Murray, Michelle Pfeiffer, Michael Douglas), Marvel IP, and clamoring cosmic razzle dazzle.

For a few expository minutes, at least, Rudd is just Scott Lang again, "a divorced-dad ex-con" who once helped save the world from Thanos and now has written a cheerful memoir about his version of events, Look Out for the Little Guy. He still has his faithful longtime girlfriend, Hope (Evangeline Lilly), a.k.a. the Wasp, and a now-teenage daughter, Cassie (Blockers' Kathyrn Newton); even his would-be in-laws, the mad scientists Hank and Janet (Douglas and Pfeiffer) have settled into mellow domesticity.

Jay Maidment/Marvel Studios Paul Rudd and Jonathan Majors in 'Ant-Man and the Wasp" Quantumania'

Except they haven't, really: Janet continues to be haunted by her time in the Quantum Realm, the subatomic dimension in which she was stranded for three decades, though she hates to speak about it — unaware that Hank, happily oblivious to her secret trauma, has been helping Cassie build a DIY portal to it in his basement. When light beams and quantum things go awry, all five are sucked into the Realm, and microverse chaos begins.

What they find there is not, it turns out, the barren place that Janet portrayed but a whole tiny cosmos, a sprawling Star Wars cantina of extraterrestrial spheres and species. And the man they all learn to fear is someone she (and any Disney+ subscribers who watched Loki) know well: Kang the Conquerer (Lovecraft Country's Jonathan Majors).

Thirty films in, the Marvel Cinematic Universe has become not unlike a box of chocolates; the high-fructose casing is guaranteed, but the flavors and the mouthfeel change. The original Ant-Man, whose cowriters included Adam McKay (Anchorman, The Big Short) and Edgar Wright (Baby Driver) had the rat-a-tat snap of a story rooted more in high multiplex comedy than mythology. This one is penned alone by Jeff Loveness, an alum of Jimmy Kimmel and Rick and Morty, and his take is both noisier and more patently absurd: a spinning Gravitron that shoots off wry one-liners, clangorous CG fight scenes, and shameless sentiment in equal, if hectic, measure. (Much like another fast and furious franchise, there is nothing stronger here than family.)

Rudd, furrowing his ageless brow, has buffed his twinkly Everyguy appeal to an affable gleam, though it still seems vaguely impossible that this man is both a thieving mastermind and an Avenger of the highest order (the counterintuitive casting, one imagines, was the point). Newton makes for a generic sort of plucky movie teen, and actors like Murray and Corey Stoll, who returns as Darren Cross/Yellowjacket, have fun nibbling on the loony little morsels of dialogue they're given.

The outlier in all these lighthearted shenanigans is Majors, an actor soon to be seen in the brawnier dramas Creed III and Magazine Dreams. Marked by scars that bisect his brow bone and spill down his cheeks like a trail of tears, his Kang is a Quantam Othello, and Iago, too: a tragic villain fearfully convinced of his own righteousness. That sometimes makes for a strange tonal fit in a film that aims so purely to entertain; waiter, why is there Shakespeare in my soup?

But it's effective, too, even if nearly all of Kang's origin story goes unexplained — saved, no doubt, for the next uncountable sequels. Like most of the movies in this multiverse, Quantumania often alludes to other MCU incidents and characters without providing narrative training wheels for the wholly uninitiated or even the casual fan (though it's questionable how much that matters, if at all).

Returning director Reed, whose previous territory leaned more toward the pom-poms of Bring It On and Jim Carrey's Yes Man, sometimes gets swallowed by the whirling spectacle of it all: a ringmaster overtaken by pew-pew battles and talking space blobs. At just over 120 minutes, though — a blink in Marvel time — this Ant-Man is clever enough to be fun, and wise enough not overstay its welcome. Who better understands the benefits, after all, of keeping it small? Grade: B

Related content:

• Paul Rudd says his son thought he worked in a movie theater for years: 'I never corrected him'

• Jonathan Majors on Heath Ledger's Joker and creating complex villains for Creed and Ant-Man

• Director Peyton Reed teases scope of Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania: 'We went big and we also went small'