“Ant-Man” is No Picnic; “Cocaine Bear” Smarter Than the Average Gory Movie

By Bryan VanCampen

You have to give Peyton Reed’s “Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania” (Disney-Marvel, 2023, 124 min.) credit for jettisoning so many characters and running gags established in the first two “AntMan” movies. (If you’re a big fan of Michael Pena and his ex-con security team or Judy Greer as Scott Lang’s ex-wife, they’re MIA here)

Number three drops the gang into the quantum realm for the bulk of the film and gets more and more expansively psychedelic. The backgrounds look like seven Roger Dean “Yes” album covers duking it out with nine Peter Max blacklight posters, and is populated with more bizarre species and creatures than Dis- ney’s recent steampunk animated feature “Strange World”: houses that move, and tote weapons and fight. When Michael Douglas sees an alien and says that it looks like a head of broccoli, he's not kidding.

All that trippy character and production design is what’s good about the movie. We’ve seen so many spaceships and weird aliens that it must be a real challenge to come up with fresh concepts, and the “Quantumania” designers have done that; the QR section of the movie is always fun to watch, as is Kathryn Newton, making her “supersuit” debut as Scott’s daughter Cassie. Paul Rudd’s befuddled everyman charm is delightful to see. (Just wait for the “probability storm” sequence.)

What’s bad about the movie?

Jonathan Majors’ Kang the Con- queror is a pretty meh villain, just another psycho spaceman, but he’s no Thanos. You can give Kang a massive army of henchmen with glowing blue-white dome heads, but that doesn’t make him Darth Vader. A huge comedy star makes a cameo, but it’s a fizzle and a missed opportunity. And in a movie crammed with so many odd new characters, Evangeline

Lilly’s Wasp is just sort of…there, with no real arc for her character. Too bad, considering she was revealed as such a badass in “AntMan and the Wasp” (2018).

My two favorite movies of 2023 thus far are the killer doll horror movie “M3GAN” and Elizabeth Banks’ dark comedic splatter-fest, “Cocaine Bear” (Universal, 2023, 95 min.) . I saw “Cocaine Bear” opening night at Cinemapolis with the largest, loudest and rowdiest collegiate crowd in a long time, and let me tell you, that’s the way to see it.

Based on a true story from 1985 about a bear that got its snout into a bunch of lost nose candy, “Cocaine Bear” is that rare comedy horror flick that really delivers on the yuks and the yucks. As much as the cokedout bear is an engine of violence and chaos, the human characters – drug dealers, kids and local park rangers – all seem to have guns, and most of them are bigger threats than the bear. The whole movie is like the part of a Stephen King novel where everything goes horrifyingly wrong in a matter of minutes.

The cast is loaded with ringers like Keri Russell (“Mission: Im- possible III”), O’Shea Jackson Jr. (“Straight Outta Compton”), Alden Ehrenreich (“Hail, Caesar!”), Margo Martindale (TV’s “Justified) and the late Ray Liotta in his final film role. I’ve always enjoyed Elizabeth Banks as an actress in pictures like “Wet Hot American Summer” (2001), “The LEGO Movie” (2014), “Brightburn” (2019) and Sam Raimi’s “SpiderMan” trilogy. I was pleasantly surprised at how game Banks is as a horror director. I wouldn’t be surprised if she returns to the genre.

“Cocaine Bear” is very bloody, but it’s also bloody funny.

“Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania” playing at Regal Stadium 14.

“Cocaine Bear” playing at Cinemapolis and Regal Stadium 14.

RIP: Stella Stevens (“Girls! Girls! Girls!”, “The Nutty Professor”, “The Poseidon Adventure”)

RIP Richard Belzer (“The Groove Tube”, “Fame”, “Café Flesh”, “Author! Author!”, “Night Shift”, “Freeway”, “The Big Picture”, “Mad Dog and Glory”, “North”, “The Puppet Masters”, “Girl 6”, “A Very Brady Sequel”, “Species II”)