Ant-Man punches above his weight
Not since Animal against the advice of Dr Bunsen Honeydew and Beaker ingested Insta-Growth 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, careening chase culminates in a dramatic fall into the ocean sounded not with an explosive splash but with a tiny ripple and a “Plink!”
“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 with only an occasional aside to acknowledge their inherent silliness. But slapstick is in the DNA of “Ant-Man and The Wasp.”
The Marvel product has grown more dynamic and varied in recent years. But if you’re not going to reach the mythic heights of “Black Panther,” the light-hearted antics of “Ant-Man and The Wasp” are your nextbest bet.
Just as “Black Panther” styled itself after a spy thriller, “Ant-Man” takes from the heist movie. The first installment 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.
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 (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 30 years been locked away in the “quantum realm,” a mind and matterbending subatomic limbo.
To send someone into the realm on a rescue mission, Pym and Van Dyne have built a sophisticated laboratory 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).
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.