NEW ANT-MAN COMES UP SHORT
Sequel doesn’t quite justify the buzz
In case you were wondering where Ant-Man was during the mayhem that was Avengers: Infinity War — well, the answer is pretty prosaic. He was under house arrest.
Scott Lang, a.k.a. Ant-Man, a.k.a. Paul Rudd, starts the new movie hanging out in his home, where he builds Rube Goldberg devices to amuse his daughter and occasionally enjoys such classic Dad rock as Dusty Springfield or the theme from The Partridge Family.
But supers gotta hero, and soon enough Scott finds himself dragged back into action to help rescue the wife of Ant-suit inventor Hank Pym (Michael Douglas), lost these past 30 years in the Quantum Realm, which is also my nickname for where I keep my least favourite Bond DVDs.
Sure, Hank has enlisted his daughter Hope (Evangeline Lilly) and given her an even better suit — waspish, with wings. But they still need Scott’s expertise and maybe a piece or two from his old suit, much in the way your obsolete cellphone needs a charging dongle that no one uses anymore.
The rescue-mission plot line gives this new Ant-Man movie a rather tepid sense of urgency. It’s never even explained how someone could survive for decades in the subatomic world with nothing to eat or drink except water molecules that are bigger than they are.
And the villains are a modest bunch. Ghost (Hannah JohnKamen) has a terrifying mask, but her power is to phase in and out of solidity, which in practical terms just means she could leave a party and not be missed for 20 minutes or so.
And her greatest desire is to be normal again, for which she’ll need some of Pym’s wife-saving technology.
The other baddie is Sonny Burch, played by Walton Goggins, and he isn’t so much villainous as aggressively capitalistic: When Hope says no to a business deal, he goes for a very hostile takeover instead. The movie’s MacGuffin is Hank’s high-tech lab, which sits on a decrepit corner in San Francisco but can also be shrunk to the size of carry-on luggage, no doubt driving the people at Google Street View bonkers.
The films of the Marvel cinematic universe — Ant-Man and the Wasp is the 20th, and should nudge their combined box office to more than $17 billion worldwide — have always bested their dour DC rivals when it comes to mixing humour and drama, with Jeff Goldblum’s character in the buddy comedy Thor: Ragnarok merely the most striking recent example.
But director Peyton Reed has baked a little too much funny powder into this latest cookie. Rudd’s character has always been one of the sillier superheroes, with his I-can’t-quitebelieve-I’m-doing-this patter. But Ant-Man and the Wasp also features more of the motormouthed Michael Peña heading up the three stooges that are part of his home-security company, and Randall Park as a foppish fed.
Add in Goggins’ goofy gangster and you’re left with a movie in desperate need of dramatic relief. And while the fights and stunts are occasionally eye-catching, those eyes often end up wandering off as the combination of fast editing and quick-growing-and-shrinking props makes it hard to follow the action.
Ant-Man and the Wasp is still intermittent fun, particularly for fans of tardigrades, the waterdwelling micro-fauna that had a brief cameo in the first AntMan, and get their well-deserved close-up in this one. And not to rush the ending, but the closing credits are beautiful, reminiscent of the 2010 documentary Marwencol and its upcoming fictional version, Welcome to Marwen.
Finally, I’d be remiss if I didn’t recommend you stay for the mid-credit scene, which does even more to tie the timeline into the larger Marvel universe. The end-of-credits sequence essentially repeats an image from earlier in the movie. If you want to shrink your movie-going experience a little, you could skip out on it.