Friendly fun from Marvel’s miniature heroes
Film Ant-man and the Wasp 12A cert, 118 min ★★★★★
Dir Peyton Reed Starring Paul Rudd, Evangeline Lilly, Michael Douglas, Michelle Pfeiffer, Michael Peña, Laurence Fishburne
Measured against the intergalactic teaming-up and cosmos-saving of their fellow avengers in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, Ant-man (Paul Rudd) and The Wasp (Evangeline Lilly) are pleasingly occupied nowhere but in their own back yard. They’re like the superheroes next door, affably tinkering around with the quantum mechanics that let them miniaturise or enlarge each other at will.
The story here involves The Wasp trying to get her mother back, after the realisation of her physicist father (Michael Douglas) that it may be possible to retrieve her from the molecular purgatory into which she vanished years earlier. To recap: Douglas’s Hank Pym and his wife Janet (Michelle Pfeiffer) were the original Ant-man and the original Wasp.
The obstacles come in unlikely shapes – the Feds are only part of the problem. There’s also a blackmarketeer trying to get his hands on their technology, and a villain called Ghost, lacking solid shape after an experiment gone haywire, who believes her only hope of a cure is extracting Pfeiffer’s quantum essence.
Ant-man and the Wasp competes with Thor: Ragnarok for being the closest to pure, throwaway fun from the recent Marvel crop. But it supplies something warmer and cosier: a Marvel film giving off the repeated vibe that in some other space and time, Pixar might have made it.