The Verdict: Make the MCU Great Again
The new "Ant-Man" sucks, so let's talk about other Marvel movies instead.
Welcome to The Verdict, a weekly column in which I categorize film and television into one of three boxes: Underrated, Overrated, and Perfectly Rated.
Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania sucks. It’s boring, it’s lackluster, it looks ugly, and there are no consequences to its mind-numbing narrative. Half of its main cast doesn’t do anything meaningful across its two-hour runtime. The action sequences lack punch and weight. Bill Murray shows up for a five minute cameo, and fails to spice up anything. (Remember, this is Bill Murray we’re talking about.) By the end of the film, Scott Lang (Paul Rudd) ends up just where he started, having learned nothing, having changed nothing, having left his audience stupified as to Ant-Man’s purpose in this neverending Marvel Cinematic Universe. I’ll say it again: Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania sucks.
This isn’t a controversial statement. Quantumania is the second of two MCU films to have received a “rotten” score on the Tomatometer—the other being Chloé Zhao’s Eternals—and has arrived amid a feeling that Marvel President Kevin Feige has lost some essential part of his creative mojo. The last few films in the series have failed to live up to the high expectations set by “The Infinity Saga,” a range of films that began with Iron Man in 2008 and concluded with Avengers: Endgame in 2019. Those days feel long gone—and if Quantumania is anything to go by, we’re screwed.
But why relish in the negativity of the present, when we could venture into the imagined memory of the past? For this installment of The Verdict, I’m going to bask in the warm glow of nostalgia and offer my thoughts on the MCU during its heyday, boxing these films into the usual categories of Underrated, Overrated, and Perfectly Rated. None of this changes the fact that Quantumania is an unbearable catastrophe, but at least we can remember the good times, when men were men and movies were movies and Taika Waititi wasn’t tearing the Thor franchise down into cynical profitability. (“We used to make shit in this country,” cried Frank Sobotke from his pit of neoliberal despair.) So without further ado, here’s one wistful fan’s take on the behemoth that is the Marvel Cinematic Universe, the biggest entertainment machine ever known to man.
Underrated: Ant-Man
One of the many disappointments of Quntumania is that it forgot the joy of letting Paul Rudd being Paul Rudd. The guy is so likeable! Spend ten seconds with him and you’re charmed! For all the things that Ant-Man got wrong—more than a few things, admittedly—it got its star performances 100% right, emblemized by Rudd’s mini-man turn as Scott Lang, a San Francisco jewel thief unexpectedly thrown into insect-sized superherodom. The plot, similarly insect-sized, is filled with your basic rom-com tropes, spiced up with the occasional heist moive flair. But ultimately, what makes this an undeappreciated gem is that it cares less about world-ending supervillains than moments of dumb fun.
Ant-Man has come to be seen as something of a lesser MCU film, which, while true, is also what provides it with a sense of endearing whimsy. The film coasts on the charisma of its vaudeville performers, including the endearing Michael Peña, playing Scott’s jewel-thief homeboy. His meandering voiceover soliloquies always manage to put a smile on my face. (Why the hell didn’t they let him into Quantumania?) So much of Ant-Man is less than stellar—the limp direction by Peyton Reed is here the worst offender, especially tragic since Edgar Wright was originally slated to direct—but the film also manages to pack in genuinely fun performances from actors who actually get the chance to act. Nowadays, CGI-ridden universes steal all performative flair.
Underrated: Iron Man 3
I am of a tiny contigent of Marvel fans (“There are dozens of us!”) who believes Iron Man 3 to be among the best action comedies of the 21st century, and the single greatest MCU film of all time. Directed with slapstick gusto by comedy maestro Shane Black, Iron Man 3 features Robert Downey Jr.’s greatest performance as Tony Stark, and is perhaps Black’s greatest cinematic achievement—and he directed The Nice Guys!
It still baffles me that people don’t recognize Iron Man 3 as the masterwork that it is. Everyone was up in arms about the fact that The Mandarin wasn’t actually The Mandarin, but you know what? Ben Kingsley was HILARIOUS, so get over yourselves. And the rest of the damn movie is hilarious, too! Remember when Tony invented Iron Man Kung Fu? Remember when Tony had PTSD? This was an emotionally compelling plotpoint! There has never been a better case for allowing a director to have full creative control over their Marvel properties than Iron Man 3, a bonkers dive into a superhero’s paranoid psyche with charm and childish wit to spare.
Overrated: Thor: Love and Thunder
It’s somewhat difficult to call a movie overrated when it has a “57” rating on Metacritic, but here’s my case: Thor: Love and Thunder is not just the worst film in the MCU—it is the worst film by a wide margin. (Quantumania is still second to this atrocity.) We already had three Thor movies by the time Love and Thunder rolled into theaters last summer, which itself proved that we really, really didn’t need a fourth one. No Marvel movie has had a more lifeless narrative, featuring phoned-in performances from Chris Hemsworth, Natalie Portman, and Tessa Thompson alike. Then again, I find it hard to blame the actors with a script so dull, production so inert, and CGI so blatantly incoherent.
It’s strange to consider that Love and Thunder director Taika Waititi—the prankster comedian behind films like Hunt for the Wilderpeople and What We Do in the Shadows—couldn’t manage to turn this into something more exciting. He already made Thor: Ragnarok, the third film in the series, into a demonstrably fun experience. If Waititi couldn’t save Love and Thunder, what does that say for the future of the MCU?
Overrated: Spider-Man: No Way Home
It’s been a year, so can we finally face the facts? Spider-Man: No Way Home is not a good movie. It brought back Tobey Maguire and Andrew Garfield from franchise death, yes, but at the end of the day, that wasn’t anything more than shallow nostalgia. It was a cheap trick that conned audiences into spending a whopping $1.92 billion at the global box office, single-handedly saving cinema from its COVID near-death experience in the process. (Move over, Top Gun: Maverick.) While that was happening, everyone forgot to remember that blockbusters are actually supposed to be, uh, what was it… Oh, right: they’re supposed to be fun. No Way Home’s script is shoddy and cliché-ridden, its direction boring and inert. The real problem is that the film’s nostalgia-bait premise is stupid from the outset. Doctor Strange decides to reset the entire universe (let me repeat that: reset the entire universe) because Peter Parker is trying to… get into college? What???
Perfectly Rated: Avengers: Infinity War + Avengers: Endgame
For all its ups and downs, the thing that turned Marvel into the blockbuster bemoth it is today were its characters. The concept of The Avengers is inherently dumb—bringing together a bunch of white dudes named Chris to play tech billionaires and Norse gods and World War II vets, then getting them to fight a cosmic nihilist who looks like a shriveled fruit is pretty darn silly. But when it works, it works, and the one-two punch of Infinity War and Endgame are truly heroic experiences. Here, the ballad of Tony Stark came to a swelling crescendo, and RDJ got to send off his multi-decade performance with epic, mythological scope. More than this, each Avenger gets their moment in the sun, concluding over twenty films of serialized insanity.
The phrase “event movie” gets thrown around a lot nowadays, so much so that it has lost some of its meaning. But these Avengers movies understood the meaning of the word: epic and important and truly awe-inspiring cinematic experiences that represented a franchise at its best. They delivered on the promise of an interconnected cinema machine with multi-billion-dollar revenues that somehow felt earned. Audiences stood up in riotous applause when Captain America picked up Thor’s hammer not out of empty nostalgia, but because of a decade of serialized storytelling that deserved its laudits. I, for one, miss it dearly.
Agree or disagree with these takes? Have any underrated/overrated takes of your own? Let me know in the comments!