The third and desultory “Ant-Man” movie, “Quantumania,” laid there like a green-screen lox. But it does, sometimes, and maybe more often lately.

What’s enticing to Disney and Marvel Studios doesn’t necessarily have to feel like punishment.

The snark tastes like ashes in your mouth: If it’s not a casual beatdown of a mugging scored, jauntily, to “I’m Always Chasing Rainbows,” it’s a fuzzball of a mutated pet peeing itself for a laugh while fireballs and mayhem consume the frame, expensively. I saw “Guardians 3″ with a full crowd ready to whoop, and the whooping ended with the opening credits. The tonal clashes don’t stimulate they flatten the collective response. Is there really much of a difference between Gunn’s notion of fantasy brutality and suffering and “realistic” bloodletting? As designed and executed here, with the usual digital viscera flying around just quickly enough to ensure the (frankly idiotic) PG-13 rating, I don’t think so. We end up waiting for the reductive punchline, or for another round of wanton slaughter. The full-on assault on the audience’s tear ducts in much of “Guardians 3″ may be sincere, but the rhythms and pacing of the film never find the beat. Here it’s just sourness and chaos the whole way, with every thundering golden-oldies hit setting the tone of things, mostly ironically, always, always obviously. These details aside: I’ve enjoyed much of Gunn’s work, especially the first “Guardians” and the recent box office flop “The Suicide Squad.” At his most intuitive, he cracks the elusive code of violence mixed with macabre humor. There, and on an already broken-down Counter-Earth, Gunn favors little touches of Stanley Kubrick’s “A Clockwork Orange” and, more innocently, the 1966 “Fantastic Voyage,” if “Fantastic Voyage” set course for a pus-flecked version of Willy Wonka’s chocolate factory. There’s more, notably a wary reunion of Quill and the memory-wiped reborn version of Gamora (Zoe Saldana), and a trip to the Orgosphere, which is pink, skeezy-looking joint.

The galaxy and the ground within review