Ant-Man and The Wasp
(M, 118 mins) Directed by Peyton Reed ★★★★
Reviewed by Graeme Tuckett
Three years after Ant-Man turned up out of nowhere and promptly became one of the funniest and most likeable instalments in this Marvel series, Paul Rudd is back in the suit. And this time, he has a co-worker. Ant-Man and The Wasp takes place after the events of Captain America: Civil War and immediately before Avengers: Infinity War. The film pretty much assumes you have a working knowledge of those two films – at least – to really understand what is going on here.
Scott Lang/Ant-Man is living under house arrest as a result of taking part in the scrap that closed out Civil War. Hope Van Dyne – AKA The Wasp (Evangeline Lilly) – and her dad Hank (Michael Douglas) are hiding out in an abandoned office block, which they can conveniently shrink to size of carry-on luggage whenever they need to travel. Hope and Hank are both working obsessively to bring Hope’s mother Janet (Michelle Pfeiffer) back from ‘‘the quantum realm’’ into which she vanished 30 years ago. Lawrence Fishburne brings some gravity as a conflicted ex-colleague of Hank.
Got all that? Good.
On the screen, Ant-Man and The Wasp is mostly just a bunch of fun. And after the histrionics and apocalyptic resolution of Infinity War, that’s kinda nice. The film might end on a moment of disquiet, but the journey there is a rollercoaster of inventive stunts, perfectly scaled special-effects, some really smart design (the purely digital quantum realm is a thing of beauty) and characters who really do seem to get along and enjoy each other’s company.
Helping – a lot – is that this is a very female-led production. There is plenty for the boys to do, but it’s Lilly and newcomer Hannah John-Kamen as Ava Foster/Ghost who get through the bulk of the most impressive stunt sequences. A few people have pointed out that Ant-Man and The Wasp might be the first superhero movie in which the women are allowed to be sweaty and bedraggled at the end of a fight. If that’s true, then take a bow Wellington’s own Hil Cook, make-up artist to Lilly since The Hobbit and general force of nature.
With Randall Park (Veep), Michael Pena (A Wrinkle in Time), Divian Ladwa
(The Detectorists) and the great Walton Goggins (The Hateful Eight) in support, Ant-Man and The Wasp is almost over-run with cameo talent. The film constantly undercuts and up-ends itself via this platoon of scene-stealers. A serious moment is blown to bits by a phone call from a child who can’t find her soccer boots. An attempted interrogation veers off into an hilarious sidebar on what is and isn’t a truth serum.
It’s a refreshingly loose and daffy approach to the genre that Marvel seems to have a lock on. Every couple of years the studio throws a bone to those of us who can never take characters in spandex too seriously. Trust me, it’s appreciated.
Ant-Man and The Wasp is a chilled glass of lemonade after the peaty top-shelf of Infinity War.
Go in not expecting much but to enjoy it, and with maybe a little knowledge of what has gone before, and I’m pretty sure you’ll like it as much as I did.