Paul Rudd and Jonathan Majors in Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania [Jay Maidment]

ANT-MAN AND THE WASP: QUANTUMANIA
Directed by Peyton Reed
Certificate: 12a
☆☆☆

ANT-MAN zipped in to the Marvel Universe in 2015 and benefitted from an excellent cast and a narrative that accepted the premise was a hoot and ran with that. This third outing is also crammed with the jokes that have made this one of the most entertaining of the Marvel franchises.

Scott (Paul Rudd) is in a happier place than he has been in previous instalments. The former burglar who pinched a suit that shrinks you has settled with his daughter Cassie (Kathryn Newton) in the Bay area and is loving life as Ant-Man.

Not so Cassie – she’s a principled youngster overflowing with righteous indignation at the state of the planet. While Scott has been living his best life, semi-retired as a superhero and enjoying the plaudits that come with the territory, Cassie has been hanging out with grandpa.

This may sound harmless but her old pops is Hank Pym, crazy scientist (Michael Douglas) and they’ve been peeking in to the Quantum Realm.

For those who saw the last episode, you’ll recall scientist Janet Ven Dyne (Michelle Pfeiffer) was rescued from the Quantum Realm after years in this other dimension. Guess what? Something nasty lurks there and very quickly, after the scene of domestic bliss has been set, our heroes find themselves sucked into a psychedelic vortex that takes them into a place you need a degree in astrophysics to properly comprehend.

Every superhero film needs a big bad monster to take on and Kang the Conqueror (Jonathan Majors) provides the villain with buckets of panto-like glee. Kang is a key character in the Marvel Universe and Quantumania feels like it has the twin aims of leading us on another Ant-Man adventure but also introduce a new top dog of evil nastiness for the Avengers to get to grips with in later films.

Majors provides a steely and compelling villain, and it helps carry a plot along that, despite its adventurous setting, offers few surprises.

Quantumania does what good sci-fi has to – bite off some chunky themes about reality, matter, time and deal with it in a esoteric, anything goes way.

It allows director Reed to play with Ant-Man’s eccentric humour and create a realm where anything goes. This leads to a visual problem: so many special effects bombard the senses. The leap of imagination needed becomes one very long jump, and that detracts from a zippy script and all-in performances.