QUANTUM FUN
A playful ‘Ant-Man and the Wasp’ is just the right summer tonic
It’s nice, for a change, to see a superhero movie in which a big building doesn’t blow up. Even nicer to discover that, with the help of a handy remote control, the building can suddenly shrink to the size of a suitcase, small enough to tuck away in the overhead compartment.
“Ant-Man and the Wasp,” for its part, proves just as winningly compactible. Its zippy action scenes and trippy bursts of kaleidoscopic color look great in a theater, but in some ways its whimsical sensibility and playful, diverting story might feel just as well-suited to the dimensions of your in-flight entertainment screen.
That may not sound like a compliment, but it is. The Disney-Marvel movie cycle and its various subfranchises have always been haunted by dreams of global domination — something craved by emotionally stunted supervillains and, not to be redundant, box-office-hungry studio executives. In this bigger-is-better context, a movie about a hero who finds his strength in tininess is, well, no small thing. Even multi-billion-dollar enterprises need a bit of modulation every now and then.
And so “Ant-Man and the Wasp” — nimbly directed, like its 2015 predecessor, by Peyton Reed — is being rolled out as a midsummer tonic, something bright and cheery to chase away the apocalyptic torpor of “Avengers: Infinity War.” Presumably it will also serve to cleanse the audience’s palate before that movie’s evenmore-epic sequel, due out in theaters next year along with another Disney-Marvel extravaganza, “Captain Marvel.”
Ant-Man’s lovable underdog status, perfectly embodied by Paul Rudd’s lazy charm in the lead role, is thus every bit as carefully engineered as any of the larger, more consequential goings-on in the Marvel Cinematic Universe. Happily, his latest adventure is no less enjoyable for its calculation. “Ant-Man and the Wasp” is a movie of deliberately low stakes and, for that very reason, enormous charm.
There is no need to prepare yourself beforehand by perusing a copy of “The Natural History of Ants,” or by subjecting yourself to a 31hour Marvel movie mara-
Rated: PG-13, for some sci-fi action, violence Running time: 2 hours, 5 minutes
Playing: In general release starting Friday