Marvel has announced that this man is the villain of the next decade, and after two hours in his company I don’t believe it.
My least favourite of the three Ant-Man films. A three, and that’s the ceiling rather than a rounding down.
The Kang problem
Let me be specific, because this isn’t a complaint about Jonathan Majors, who is committed and does interesting things with the voice.
It’s a structural problem. Think about how Thanos was built. Bits and pieces across years, a shot here, a chair there, a name mentioned and not explained. By the time he arrived you’d been waiting so long that his presence did the work before he opened his mouth. He was an event.
Kang is being introduced by showing us his face constantly, and the premise requires that, because every variant is a different man. So instead of one accumulating threat you get a series of introductions, none of which can carry the weight of the last, because there’s always another one coming.
And on the evidence here, he isn’t strong enough. I don’t rate him at the level of Loki as an antagonist, let alone as somebody who could stand against Thor or the genuinely cosmic end of this universe. He’s a man who explains his plans at length and is beaten by a man who shrinks. That’s a hard sell for the next ten years.
The Council of Kangs is the best thing in it
Which makes the mid-credits scene genuinely frustrating, because it’s excellent. A stadium of them, all variants, all differently mad, bickering about what to do with a universe. The way they carry themselves is really quite awesome, and for two minutes I could see the version of this that works: not one villain, but a fractious empire of the same man, none of whom agree.
That’s the best part of the film by a distance, and it’s in the credits. If that’s the direction, there’s something here. It’s just not in the two hours preceding it.
The Quantum Realm doesn’t convince
Visually this is where the film lost me. The creatures, the landscapes, the various inhabitants all feel a bit too Disney, and there are long stretches that look closer to an animated cartoon than a place.
That’s a problem when the entire film happens there. The first Ant-Man worked partly because it was small and grounded, a heist film with a gimmick, set in recognisable rooms. Dropping the whole family into a fully digital world removes the contrast that made the shrinking interesting in the first place.
Some of the design is imaginative. Very little of it feels like somewhere you could stand.
M.O.D.O.K. is going to divide people. I found him more strange than funny, and the film can’t decide whether he’s a joke or a tragedy, so he ends up as neither.
Scott is still good company
The saving grace, and the reason this isn’t lower.
It’s always good to spend time with Scott Lang, and Paul Rudd is as reliable as ever. The character has been the most likeable thing in this franchise since Civil War, largely because he’s the only one who seems to find any of this ridiculous. He’s a burglar who got lucky, he knows it, and the films have never once asked him to become a warrior.
There’s a good moment where he’s confronted with the scale of what he’s walked into and simply doesn’t have the frame of reference for it. That’s the character working properly.
The Cassie material half works. The idea that she’s grown up angry and activist while he was away is decent, and the film keeps interrupting it to get to the next set piece.
Janet is the film’s missed opportunity
Michelle Pfeiffer has the most interesting role in the picture and the least room to play it.
She spent thirty years down there. She knows what’s in the Quantum Realm, she knows who Kang is, she made a decision she’s ashamed of, and she has spent the entire time since refusing to talk about any of it. That’s a proper story, and it’s the one the film keeps postponing.
When it finally arrives it lands as exposition rather than as revelation, because it’s being delivered in a hurry to explain the plot rather than because a character has decided to be honest. Give that thread the runtime it deserves and this is a much better film.
Where it lands
A three, maximum. Not my favourite, and after the heist that made the Quantum Realm matter I expected more from a film that takes place entirely inside it.
The honest issue is that this is doing a job rather than telling a story. It exists to establish Kang, and everything else, the family, the realm, the returning cast, is arranged around that task. When the villain doesn’t land, the whole structure sags.
The Kang Dynasty is on the schedule and I’d like to be wrong about all of this. What I’ve seen so far is a talkative man in a chair, and I’ve been here before with a certain other multiversal introduction that promised more than it delivered. Show me the Council and I’m interested. Show me one of him and I’m not.
