Marvel keeps it all in proportion
REVIEW Ant-Man and the Wasp 3D Where: Capitol 6, Cineplex Odeon Westshore, Landmark Cinemas University Heights, SilverCity Imax Starring: Paul Rudd, Evangeline Lilly, Michael Pena, Bobby Cannavale, Michael Douglas Directed by: Peyton Reed Parental advisory: PG Rating: Three stars out of four
Not since Animal, against the advice of Dr. Bunsen Honeydew and Beaker, ingested InstaGrowth pills has a movie had as much fun with scale as Ant-Man and The Wasp.
Among the greatest threats to the shape-shifting heroes of the Marvel sequel are windshield wipers, salt shakers and seagulls. This is surely the first movie to weaponize that most fearsome of terrors, a giant Hello Kitty Pez dispenser. In one of the film’s finest moments, a loud chase culminates in a dramatic fall into the ocean sounded not with an explosive splash but with a tiny ripple and a “Plink!”
In both scale and ambition, Ant-Man and The Wasp is an altogether more modest affair, and it’s so much the better for it. Most Marvel movies strenuously insist on how much they matter — how much a carefully stitched together comic-book apparatus hangs in the balance — with only an occasional aside to acknowledge their inherent silliness. But slapstick is a part of Ant-Man and The Wasp.
For some Marvel devotees, Ant-Man and The Wasp will be a clever enough diversion in between the more main-event releases. But it’s pretty much exactly what I’d want in a superhero movie: a funny cast, zippy action scenes and not an infinity stone in sight.
The Marvel product has, it should be noted, grown more dynamic and varied in recent years. But if you’re not going to reach the mythic heights of Black Panther, the lighthearted antics of Ant-Man and The Wasp are your next-best bet. As different as they are, the two films have one crucial thing in common — no outer space.
Just as Black Panther styled itself after a spy thriller, Ant-Man takes from the heist movie. The first instalment, in 2015, was a somewhat muddled franchise debut, thanks to a late director shuffle. Peyton Reed, who took over production on the first one, is back here, and he has carved out a real identity for Paul Rudd’s character, among the most selfcontained in Marvel’s “cinematic universe.”
And more than its predecessor, Ant-Man and The Wasp has adopted the goofball charm of its leading man. Coming a few years after Ant-Man, Rudd’s Scott Lang is now under house arrest for his involvement in the Berlin showdown of Captain America: Civil War.
When his 10-year-old daughter, Cassie (Abby Ryder Fortson), isn’t around, he passes the time playing drums and learning magic tricks. With just days to go before Randall Park’s S.H.I.E.L.D. agent is to remove Lang’s monitoring device, he’s summoned by the brains behind their last adventure — Dr. Hank Pym (a sometimes inthe-way Michael Douglas) and Pym’s daughter, Hope van Dyne (Evangeline Lilly), whose winged Ant-Man-like suit has earned her the Wasp moniker.
Pym believes his wife, Janet (Michelle Pfeiffer), has, for the past 30 years, been locked away in the “quantum realm,” a mind- and matter-bending subatomic limbo that, it turns out, has predictably done curiously little damage to the indestructible Pfeiffer. A Technicolor blur of floating blobs, the quantum realm looks like a lava lamp’s dream of heaven.
To send someone into the realm on a rescue mission, Pym and Van Dyne have built a sophisticated laboratory many storeys high that, with a click of a remote, they can shrink down to carry-on size. Their plans bring them into contact with a black-market dealer (Walton Goggins) and an old academic colleague of Pym’s (Laurence Fishburne). It also attracts the interest of the film’s villain, Ghost (Hannah John-Kamen), whose tragic past has left her burning (figuratively) and blurry (literally) with anger for being robbed of a bodily existence.
The plot is fine but many of the pleasures of Ant-Man and The Wasp come from its digressions. And no one better breaks down the molecular structure of a Marvel movie than Michael Pena. Every time he takes the screen, he threatens to destabilize it with his chatterbox excitement. When Pena’s Luis (Lang’s friend and business partner at X-Con Security) is given a truth serum, you pray for the movie to just let him keep talking until the end credits roll. Just as good is Park, who steals his scenes with a quieter deadpan.
There are more gags, too. A malfunctioning Ant-Man suit turns Rudd enormous or embarrassingly child-sized. A Hot Wheels-riff on the Bullitt car chase tumbles down the hills of San Francisco. None of this is earth-shattering stuff, but that’s part of the fun of it. Here, for once, is a Marvel movie about saving one life, not a billion.