Quantumania kicks off Marvel's Phase 5 and sets up its new over-arching villain following the very separate movies of the somewhat oddly-muted Phase 4, and thankfully it does offer some promise of what may yet come. The film has been getting mixed critical reactions, and it is not hard to see why. The third AntMan film kicks off on familiar ground - warm, funny, lightweight - but it does not take long at all before the whole Pym clan is thrown back into the quantum realm where it becomes a rather more typically straight Marvel actioner, albeit in a CG-fest of bizarre creatures and landscapes, as if the Guardians Of The Galaxy had entered Dr Strange's multiverse trip. The world-building and the actual quality of the CG work are both extensive and generally high-quality (which is impressive and works well on the cinema screen), as are the packed action set pieces. Its core themes of family and parenthood are used with as much subtlety as a flying Mjolnir, and its rather simple storylining - they get separated into two parallel-storyline groups when flung into the quantum realm, they find each other, they defeat the bad guy, they get home - does not give the film much heft. A lot of attention is given to Janet's backstory and her time lost in the quantum realm - crucial to this story - and the excellent Michelle Pfieffer does a lot of the heavy lifting very successfully in her much-expanded screen time here, but the standout is the addition of Jonathan Majors as Kang in a performance that is cool, menacing and powerful and provides the potential of a terrific ongoing threat in the future of the MCU. This attempted shift of the AntMan series from the more comedic lightweight end of the Marvel spectrum to something more central and serious makes it fall between the two stools to some extent, but Quantumania is nevertheless a well-made and entertaining blockbuster spectacle that flies by, with a mid-credits teaser sequence that sets up the future very positively.
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