125 min | PG-13 | February 17, 2023 | Walt Disney Studios Motion Pictures
Scott Lang and his family get sucked into the Quantum Realm, a subatomic world ruled by a conqueror who has been waiting for a way out. The franchise that once shrank a hero down to fight on a Thomas the Tank Engine track now blows itself up to universe-ending size. Bigger is not better.
Scott Lang has settled into life as a celebrity Avenger. He writes a memoir, signs autographs, and coasts on the goodwill of having helped save the universe. His daughter Cassie builds a device that maps the Quantum Realm, and the machine pulls the whole family into the subatomic world below reality. There they meet Kang the Conqueror, a being exiled to this realm and desperate to escape it. The film abandons the small-scale heist comedy that defined the first two Ant-Man pictures. It trades intimacy for franchise machinery and a green-screen void.
Paul Rudd plays Scott Lang as the same easygoing father, but the script gives him nothing to resist. His charm needs friction and finds none in a digital wasteland. Jonathan Majors plays Kang as a conqueror bored by his own power. He speaks in a low register and makes annihilation sound like an administrative chore, and that stillness gives the film its only real threat. Michelle Pfeiffer plays Janet van Dyne as the lone character with history in this place, and she carries pages of exposition without sinking. Kathryn Newton plays Cassie Lang with conviction the material does not earn, while Evangeline Lilly as Hope van Dyne and Michael Douglas as Hank Pym get pushed to the margins and Corey Stoll’s M.O.D.O.K. arrives as a punchline the film cannot commit to.
Peyton Reed directs from a script by Jeff Loveness, and the partnership never finds solid ground. Every frame after the opening takes place inside a fully digital Quantum Realm. The actors stand on green-screen stages with no physical sets to push against, and their faces catch light that no real source produces. Bodies drift through environments without weight, so the action carries no sense of consequence. The editing sprints between set pieces before any of them can build tension. The production design borrows from decades of science fiction without committing to a single coherent world.
The first two Ant-Man films understood that scale is a joke. A man the size of an ant fighting on a toy train is funny because the danger is real and the proportions are absurd. This film mistakes scale for spectacle and loses the gag. Kang is the only element with stakes, and he belongs to a larger story the movie is too busy assembling to inhabit. The result functions as a preview of things to come rather than a film with its own reason to exist.