Ant-Man And The Wasp: Quantumania (2023)

I have enjoyed the Ant-Man movies, despite them always feeling like lesser Marvel movies. While everything was building towards grand Avengers-based adventures, being taken on tangents with Scott Lang (Paul Rudd) and co. felt refreshingly small-scale (no pun intended) and more simplistically fun. And I own them on 3D Blu-ray, which is the best way to get maximum enjoyment from them, as far as I’m concerned.

Try as I might, however, I could not work up any enthusiasm for this third instalment in the series. Marvel have been wildly inconsistent after achieving an astonishing modern cinematic success with the finale of the Infinity War saga, and I wasn’t thrilled to think of an entire movie set on the quantum realm. We have been there before, very briefly, and it’s visualized as an alien landscape in which people can very easily lose their minds.

But here we are. Things start very quickly. Cassie (Scott’s daughter, now played by Kathryn Newton) has been working on a device to map the quantum realm. It works by beaming a signal down there, which causes a problem when something locks on to that signal and drags Cassie, her dad, Hope Van Dyne AKA The Wasp (Evangeline Lilly), Hank Pym (Michael Douglas), and Janet Van Dyne (Michelle Pfeiffer). The quantum realm is even more dangerous than ever, thanks to the looming presence of Kang The Conqueror (Jonathan Majors).

Peyton Reed may be an experienced pair of hands back in the director’s chair, and he may have his cast happy to work with the usual large amount of invisible environments to be added in later, but writer Jeff Loveness is the one trying to fit everything into the film in a way that mixes humour and tension as it sets up the new main villain of the Marvel Cinematic Universe. Sadly, he isn’t up to the task, leaving the cast floundering and the screen full of garishly overdone CGI that wouldn’t look out of place in some of the Star Wars prequels.

The only thing this gets absolutely right is the build-up for Kang, and that is as much down to the performance of Majors as it is to the script. Jokes are very hit and miss, with way more of the latter than the former, and it’s strange to even think of a whole movie set in the quantum realm when previous movies had delivered such dire warnings about accidentally going there. Then you have the issue of scale, changing scale often being a vital fun factor for these movies. It isn’t as enjoyable to watch someone shrink and supersize, depending on the situation, while they are in a world with less substantial reference points to help underline the rapid changes.

It isn’t necessarily ALL the fault of Loveness, who I am sure will have been given plenty of notes and plot points to hit, but the script here, in every way, keeps this bogged down near the very bottom of the Marvel movie pile.

Rudd is still a great choice for our hero, arguably even better at portraying an reluctant everyman hero than Tom Holland in the Peter/Spider-Man role. Newton is a great addition, playing her socially-conscious teen with an energy and naïveté that stops her from ever becoming too annoying. Douglas, Pfeiffer, and Lilly are all as good as you would hope, and all get involved in some of the action set-pieces, and there is a surprising reappearance in the series for Corey Stoll, although I am still making up my mind on whether I liked or disliked his character. Majors is the other highlight though, as I have already said, and the third act at least does well to give viewers an idea of how this character should so effectively threaten, and could even change, heroes, timelines, and realities.

There are some fun cameos, and one that feels a bit too smug and irritating (for some reason), and an intriguing moment at the end, as expected, and I will admit that some of the third act came close to making up for some of the lacklustre scenes that preceded it. Close, but not quite close enough. Visually, tonally, and even conceptually, this is a mess. It’s a shame that it couldn’t at least manage to be a consistently entertaining mess.

4/10

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Non-Stop (2014)

Stop me if you've heard this one before. Liam Neeson is a badass. He's a potential hero, but also very troubled. There's a plane full of people, with one of them being a nasty criminal type trying to grab a LOT of money. And he/she is not only trying to commit a major crime, he's also hoping to frame our hero for the job.

Yes, Non-Stop is a . . . . . non-stop selection of cliches and familiar action thriller movie moments. Which doesn't make it any less fun. A large part of the enjoyability is down to Neeson, who has been taking on this kind of role so often in recent years that he may well end up in The Expendables 10, whenever that comes along.

Things don't start off too well though. If you're not rolling your eyes when you watch Neeson use a toothbrush to stir his breakfast whiskey then you'll have a second chance to do so when he passes by a roster of usual suspects on his way to boarding his flight. There's also Julianne Moore, playing someone desperate to sit in a window seat. Everything is easily forgiven, however, as soon as Neeson gets some text messages telling him that he needs to get $150M in to a specific account or someone is going to die in 20 minutes. That starts a race against the clock, with Neeson growing increasingly desperate, and perhaps out of control, as he determines to catch his quarry.

Directed by Jaume Collet-Serra (the man responsible for a couple of fun horror movies in the past decade or so - namely Orphan and House Of Wax), and written by Christopher Roach, John W. Richardson and Ryan Engle, Non-Stop is a film that probably shouldn't work. The fact that it does, and does so well, is testament to the zippy script and the fact that Collet-Serra directs with no small amount of style and inventiveness.

Neeson is as Neeson as ever. He's a brand by this point, but a bloody good one. If you're going to invest in a Nesson then treat yourself to the original and best. Acccept no substitute. Moore does well with a role that could have easily been completely thankless, and both Michelle Dockery and Lupita Nyong'o do well as two air stewardesses. The former has more to do, but it's nice to just see Nyong'o in a situation not half as harrowing as her most famous role to date. Scoot McNairy, Nate Parker, Corey Stoll, Omar Metwally and Quinn McColgan do a decent job with their roles, despite often being asked to act nervy, or aggressive, or whatever suits the mood of the crowd as they react to Neeson's actions.

This is not a film that will blow your mind, or change the face of cinema. It doesn't have to. Few films do. This simply takes some pleasing ingredients and throws them together to make something that stands up as a piece of superior blockbuster entertainment. Translation = it's not that hard to build a decent movie around Liam Neeson kicking ass.

7/10

http://www.amazon.com/Non-Stop-Blu-ray-DVD-DIGITAL-UltraViolet/dp/B00HLTD49C/ref=sr_1_1_twi_2_twi_2?s=movies-tv&ie=UTF8&qid=1419274222&sr=1-1&keywords=non-stop