Ant-Man And The Wasp: Quantumania (PG)

125 minutes, opens on Thursday

2 stars

The story: Scott Lang (Paul Rudd) and Hope van Dyne (Evangeline Lilly), known as Ant-Man and The Wasp, are in a relationship and celebrated as heroes. Hope’s mother Janet (Michelle Pfeiffer) and father Hank Pym (Michael Douglas) are also in a state of bliss, following Janet’s rescue from the Quantum Realm. But when Lang’s daughter Cassie (Kathryn Newton) opens a portal into the Realm by accident, Janet is forced to come clean about the three decades she spent there.

Ant-Man (2015) and its 2018 sequel were based on the idea: What if we had a regular guy who becomes a superhero, like Peter Parker (Spider-Man) but without Parker’s emotional baggage?

The resulting movies were much more fun than could be expected from seeing Rudd’s average American dad thrust into weird situations. The creative team took risks. They knew that a movie built around a tourist from the suburbs who says “wow” or “woah” when he sees anything exotic would get old fast, so they made Lang open-minded and playful.

Lang took the audience along with him when he had fun with his powers of shrinking and growing. He was riding insects, dodging pets, leaping from giant mugs and spoons, stealing valuables by crawling through cracks. Those sight gags, inspired by The Borrowers (1997) and Honey, I Shrunk The Kids (1989), gave the movies a breeziness that made other Marvel films look positively grim.

The third Ant-Man film puts an end to all that. Mainly because it has a job to do – introduce Kang The Conqueror (Jonathan Majors) and explain why this multiverse-hopping entity wants what he wants, and the way he wants it. Perversely, Majors is the best, most intense part of this project. He raises the bar so high, he makes his castmates look like they are phoning it in.

The Quantum Realm, where most of the film takes place, is not where scale-of-reference fun can be had, because nothing there resembles life as we know it. The Realm’s environment is a stunning work of visual artistry to be sure, but even that is secondary to the task of setting up bigger Marvel films coming in 2023 and beyond.

The action sequences concern a story thread that Disney, having milked it in too many science-fiction and fantasy franchises, ought to ban: There is an oppressive technocratic regime that needs overthrowing by a rag-tag bunch of rebels. A government that is efficient? A bureaucracy that works? Yes, of course, blow it up. You rebels look well suited to form the new administration. After all, you wear natural fibres in earth tones.

Hot take: The Quantum Realm offers dazzling eye candy, but the novelty does not last. And the lack of freshness continues with a threadbare plot that tries to distract from the fact this film exists mainly to introduce a new Marvel movie phase.