Editor's note: The following article contains spoilers for Ant-Man and the Wasp: QuantumaniaThere are a lot of fair criticisms that could be lobbed at Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania, the underwhelming new entry in the MCU canon. It's too far removed from the low-key breezy charms of the first two Ant-Man films. Its "small group of rebels mount a charge against an evil empire" storyline cribs too heavily from the standard sci-fi/fantasy template. It focuses too much on setting up Jonathan Majors' Kang the Conquerer as the next Thanos-level MCU villain at the expense of the core Ant-Man characters. All of these things are true! And yet none of them were the reason I found myself angry when I was leaving the theater. I was seething over something far less consequential but still rather infuriating: Bill Murray could have and should have died a horrible death in this movie. It could have been an all-timer of a Marvel death scene — something to cackle about with your friends on the drive home from the movie. But the film completely whiffed on it — a pretty fitting and symbolic indictment of Quantumania on the whole, if you think about it.
Bill Murray's Lord Krylar — Not a Great Guy!
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In the movie, Murray plays Lord Krylar, a resident of the Quantum Realm who had a little fling with Michelle Pfeiffer's Janet van Dyne during the twenty years she was stuck there. After Janet, Scott Lang (Paul Rudd), and the rest of the crew found themselves trapped in the other-worldly micro-universe (with Kang hot to track them down), Janet calls on her old friend to help them escape their predicament. Krylar meets up with Janet, her daughter Hope (Evangeline Lilly), and her husband Hank (Michael Douglas) for a drink at a local watering hole filled with bizarre, alien-like patrons. Krylar orders the group a round of drinks — some kind of alcoholic concoction with a live squid-like creature included as part of the beverage. (Think the worm in a bottle of tequila.) Krylar sucks down his drink and the terrified squid, but Hank and Janet seem uninterested. Before long, Kang's security troops show up, and our heroes realize that Krylar sold them out. Chaos ensues, and, thanks to Hank's Ant-Man tech, one of the squids, still in a drink on the table, grows to a monstrous size. Looking for a little payback and with tables now turned, the giant squid wraps its tentacles around Krylar, picks him up...maybe starts to move him toward its mouth?... and then the camera pans away, cutting to Janet and company's frantic escape. If Krylar is indeed officially ingested (a big "if"), it happens deep in the background in the corner of the frame, and neither myself nor any of my Collider colleagues who saw the film last week were able to catch it.
Let me just state this bluntly: Bill Murray should have been eaten brutally and spectacularly up close in the center of the frame. The setup for it is all right there. Krylar is an asshole. He endangered our heroes. And he apparently has no regard for Quantum Realm lifeforms that are tasty and can fit into a highball glass. Whatever comeuppance he got was well deserved and should have been displayed in all its agonizing glory. That doesn't mean it needed to be overly graphic or bloody. I get that it's a PG-13 Marvel movie. But this is a rubbery, computer-generated squid eating a legendary (if not now completely beloved) comic actor. There are a good number of ways you could have some darkly comic fun with that on-screen without making it overly violent.
Great Movie Deaths Always Help, Never Hurt
Is this a minor thing? Of course, it is. But here's the rub: Movies cross over into being good when they're filled with little moments that resonate or prove memorable to the viewer. That can be as small as a single line of dialogue. Think Captain America insisting, "I can do this all day," or even Yondu proudly proclaiming, "I'm Mary Poppins, y'all!" The same goes for any moments where the audience is provided some kind of cathartic release by seeing a villain get what's coming to them in spectacular fashion. Who doesn't get a momentary thrill when Thor swiftly decapitates Thanos near the beginning of Avengers: Endgame? Or later in the film when Tony Stark outmaneuvers Thanos' time-traveling earlier self to erase him for good? And, truthfully, a great death can be effective even without the catharsis. I couldn't have been the only one cackling like a maniac when Black Bolt's head goes pop in Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness. Heck, even outside the MCU, I still find myself randomly thinking about Shea Whigham's glorious and hilarious death in Kong: Skull Island at least twice a month (Do yourself a favor and click that link if you've never seen it). The point is a great death scene can add a little pep, a little moxie to a movie, jolting the audience into having a good time.
Which is why it's so disappointing that Quantumania director Peyton Reed decided it ultimately wasn't important. (Or Kevin Feige and the Marvel team decided it for him. I wouldn't be shocked if it was decided to leave it ambiguous just in case Marvel decided Krylar could be used again down the road.) But it's tough not to envision the kind of fun, say, James Gunn or Sam Raimi might have had with the scene. Their dark senses of humor have been a boon to the MCU, either in Gunn's Guardians of the Galaxy films or Raimi's aforementioned Doctor Strange sequel, and it's a bummer to see other MCU directors shying away from emulating it when the opportunity is teed up right in front of them. This is especially true for Quantumania, which, more than any other Multiverse Saga MCU film, feels like it's being boxed into a standard Marvel template. This is a movie that could have used a little spunk and a bit more devilish humor. Freed from the confines of the glass and suddenly large enough to take on all comers, that squid should have gotten to eat, literally and metaphorically. Marvel has all these special-effects houses on the payroll anyway. Certainly one of them could have given us a glorious, up-close, center-of-the-frame shot of Bill Murray getting the devouring he deserves.
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