Did you know that Ant-Man & the Wasp: Quantumania villain Kang, played by Jonathan Majors, is the Marvel Cinematic Universe's next main villain after Thanos? You almost certainly did, but not from watching that movie or anything else in the MCU. You know that because you know about Kang the Conqueror from the comics or because you watched a YouTube video or read an article about him, like this one. There's not much chance you could glean how important this guy is just from watching this movie.

So it's kind of hilarious when Janet and the residents of the Quantum Realm spend most of the movie cryptically referring to Kang as "he" and "him" instead of saying his name. Because when they do finally say it, it means nothing, as all we know about him is he's angry and wants to kill everybody--we have absolutely no further sense of him as a person or as a cosmic being. And without any setup or development, he doesn't feel like anything more than the baddie from this movie, who will return in the future.

That's partially the fault of Quantumania itself. This film is Marvel Mad Libs, having recognizably Marvel proper nouns do recognizably Marvel verbs in recognizably Marvel situations and hoping for the best. They pulled out all the old Marvel tricks for this one--introducing a generic new fantastical world with generic fantastical locals in a generic resistance movement fighting against a generic fantastical bad guy who shoots generic energy projectiles out of his hands. And a good guy whose defining trait is that he loves his daughter. For what it's worth, Jonathan Majors is doing his best with the part--and he's extremely watchable in Ant-Man & the Wasp: Quantumania. So he's not the issue.