Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania — Paul Rudd returns in good-natured B-movie sequel

Somewhere in a meeting room at Marvel Studios, within the wider Disney headquarters, a detailed presentation must have broken down exactly the target audience for Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania. In the thick of this good-natured mishmash of a B-movie (directed by Peyton Reed), you might find yourself pondering it.

The star remains the industrially likeable Paul Rudd, cast again as Scott Lang, shrunk in previous adventures into a miniature superhero. If Rudd is a draw across demographics, politically active daughter Cassie (Kathryn Newton) now pitches to Gen Z. But the project is seemingly aiming up the age scale too. For those of the vintage who may to want to see Michelle Pfeiffer and Michael Douglas star in a film together, the company says you can. You just have to watch them fight CGI goons alongside giant camel-snails.

But we open with Rudd, and the gentle midlife crisis one might expect from the second sequel to a comic offshoot. A jolt to the system is required. It comes, essentially, with a family vacation: a trip into the “quantum realm”, an alternate universe gatecrashed by Cassie, Scott, brilliant wife and mother Hope (Evangeline Lilly) and her genius parents, played by Pfeiffer and Douglas.

Like so many secret universes, lava-lamp visuals loom. Yet it is not really a universe at all, we learn, but that modern obsession: the multiverse. Though the script unpacks probability theory, the chance of anyone watching this film who hasn’t already had it explained by Spider Man: No Way Home or Everything Everywhere All At Once must now be sub-atomically small.

The loudest echoes of Everything Everywhere come with who ends up in the midst of the chaos. Just as that movie centred on Michelle Yeoh’s harried launderette owner, here too a chunk of plot goes to a woman over 60: Pfeiffer, our greenscreen action heroine. If the actress is privately puzzled as to how she got here amid the gooey effects and knowing pulp dialogue, she doesn’t let it show. “This isn’t exactly ant science, is it?” she asks Douglas, with the exact same hauteur she used in Scarface to warn Al Pacino about getting high on his own supply.

The fun (abundant) comes with Pfeiffer and the nonsense physics, the bubblegum vibe and Rudd’s fail-safe deadpan. The blockbuster fight scenes that were once every Marvel film’s centrepiece are throwaway. That much makes this an odd entry to the studio’s world for the talented Jonathan Majors, cast as new long-term villain Kang. But it is hard to resist the mischief at work here. The film has already teased the pomp of Dune before Douglas mentions socialism in admiring tones. That much confirms it. The movie won’t rest until the ghosts of Frank Herbert and Walt Disney have spun themselves silly.

★★★☆☆

In cinemas from February 17