Time works a little differently in the quantum realm, which may explain why the two-hour "Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania" lasts an eternity. To be sure, even as I entered the theater and took my seat, I found myself succumbing to a familiar, dread-soaked kind of temporal disorientation. Has it really been only three months since the last Marvel movie? And are there really just three months to go until the next one, and another three months until the one after that? Once you get sucked back into the Marvel Cinematic Universe — and the word "cinematic" feels more charitable with each repetition — time swiftly becomes a very flat and cruddy-looking CGI circle.
"It's never over," I said to myself, unaware that I was advance-quoting the movie's central villain. Here I could follow the example of Jeff Loveness' script and spend half this review writing suggestively around the bad guy's identity, using ominous sub-Voldemort sobriquets like "he" and "him." But no: His name is Kang the Conqueror, and it may startle you to hear that he possesses a metallic suit, superhuman strength and megalomaniacal tendencies. He's played by Jonathan Majors, whom you can see giving interesting performances in recent movies such as "The Last Black Man in San Francisco" and upcoming ones like "Magazine Dreams." In this one, he basically stands around indulging a series of cosmic snit fits, laying waste to the digitally confected scenery and uttering tedious epigrams about time, recurrence and the apocalypse.
But I'm getting ahead of myself. There were reasons to hope that "Quantumania" might be another slick, refreshingly low-key diversion in the style of its two "Ant-Man" predecessors (both directed, like this third movie, by the journeyman Peyton Reed). Released between longer, noisier entries in the overarching Avengers cycle, the first two "Ant-Man" movies were persuasive arguments for the less-is-more principle, with their downsized stakes, upbeat spirits and incredible shrinking superhero, Scott Lang, a.k.a. Ant-Man (the always appealing Paul Rudd). Best of all were their ingenious shifts in physical scale, as Ant-Man's ability to switch sizes at lightning speed infused the action scenes — seldom a Marvel strong suit — with a rare and playful comic dynamism. He grounded these stories and, on occasion, made them soar.
