Making a ... BIG BUZZ in a small WORLD
Micro superhero Ant-Man’s antics light up a brilliant sequel — and his new pal the Wasp is sure to stick around
WE’RE getting to that time of year when no picnic is safe from the persistent attentions of at least one wasp, with an unerringly beady eye for the person most terrified of it.
So I can’t help thinking that those clever folk at Marvel have missed a trick. The Wasp would have made a perfect name for a uniquely malevolent super-villain dedicated to spoiling everyone’s fun. Instead, she is an unambiguous goodie full of compassion and integrity, last played by Michelle Pfeiffer, and now by her screen daughter Evangeline Lilly.
There has been much frothy excitement about The Wasp’s status as the first female character to share title billing in a Marvel film, though in truth she is very much second banana; the MeToo brigade can’t yet claim to have conquered the Marvel Cinematic Universe.
Front and centre is Scott Lang (Paul Rudd), the former cat burglar with the ability to make himself ant-sized, to commandeer ant armies, and to make endless ant jokes, a reference to ‘Ant-onio Banderas’ being merely the clunkiest of them.
Scott is a superhero like no other in that most of the time he doesn’t seem to be either especially super or all that heroic. But in a way that’s the point of this sequel to 2015’s Ant-Man.
It’s not just the characters who are shrunken, but also the goodies, the baddies, the plot, the ambition.
Not that the budget, an estimated $195million, is exactly small beer (and the special effects are as good as any you’ll see), but it’s roughly half that of the last MCU production, the super-sized Avengers: Infinity War.
Presumably, this is a deliberate strategy, allowing Marvel to take a rest from the self-imposed tyranny of every blockbuster being bigger, better, louder, than the last. More important, it gives us a break, too.
AT THE start of the film, Scott is, aptly, languishing under house arrest. His crime was to support the wrong side in 2016’s Captain America: Civil War, so now he sports an ankle tag while kicking round the house improving his drumming and learning close-up magic skills.
Occasionally, his supportive ex-wife (Judy Greer) and her affable new husband (Bobby Cannavale, in a role that hardly makes the most of his charismatic, faintly saturnine screen presence) drop off Scott’s cutesy daughter, Cassie (Abby Ryder Fortson).
The script, which Rudd helped to write, neatly uses the engaging father-daughter relationship to nudge the narrative along.
But that’s not to say the story is easy to follow. In fact, if you don’t have a PhD in quantum physics, then your chances of fully understanding what’s going on are fittingly teeny. And if you do, then you’ll doubtless scoff all the way through anyway.
Like the first Ant-Man, it has something to do with the Quantum Realm, whatever that is, wherein Pfeiffer’s character, Janet Van Dyne, has been trapped for 30 years.
Her brainy scientist husband Hank (Michael Douglas) and their daughter Hope (Lilly) have built a Quantum Tunnel to it, but even though Hope too can shrink at will, they still need Scott to help them find Janet, since her messages to them are somehow channelled through his dreams.
Will Hope and Scott also resume what I suppose we can call their ‘insectstuous’ relationship from the last film? Whatever, it’s all very silly. If Hank had a son, and Hope a brother, he would have to be called Hokum.
Happily, the silliness adds to the fun, which is further whipped up by a black-market arms dealer, played by king of the screen sneer Walton Goggins, who wants to steal all Hank’s laboratory secrets — and indeed his laboratory itself, housed in a building which handily shrinks to the size of a suitcase — for his own monetary gain.
He’s a far cry from the usual Marvel villains with their schemes to destroy the universe, but he and his henchmen still provide challenging opposition in a scrap, and there are some great ones in this film.
As for Scott’s own sidekicks, they are again led by his former cellmate Luis (Michael Pena), with whom he
As, found called he offers runs film is so comic a X-Con. effectively his often, security the relief, asinine Pena opposite but a company comedy is dialogue given there of that relief. anyway, to boldly a proe the bit I ed. Nothing, the plot, which though, throws is as us forced another, as form more interesting of a character baddie called in the Ghost fuzzy nicely played by actress Hannah John-Kamen). She suffers from something called molecular disequilibrium, as I think possibly we all do, on a bad day, but hers could be the end of her, and she blames it firmly on Hank. Her mentor and potential saviour is Hank’s former partner, Bill (Laurence Fishburne), now his sworn enemy.
Really, though, the pleasures of this film are not to be found in the plot or the pseudo-scientific dialogue that drives it.
‘Can we modify a quantum spectrometer and track it?’ asks Hope, making a good show of knowing what she is talking about, yet it is a line that might have been plucked from any slab of sci-fi confection from the past 50 years or so. No, it’s the special effects that make it worth seeing, brilliantly orchestrated by director Peyton Reed. He uses his own growing and shrinking levers to deliver some hugely entertaining scenes, not least an epic car chase through the streets of San Francisco (a nod, perhaps, to Douglas, who starred in the TV series of the same name longer ago than any of us care to remember).
Rudd is terrific, too. He is funny without being glib, which in Marvel films is not always an easy trick to pull off (step forward Robert Downey Jnr).
With a less appealing actor in the title role, the Ant-Man films wouldn’t be half as enjoyable.
As it is, expect them to keep on coming. I imagine The Wasp will stick around, too. They always do.