ANT-MAN AND THE WASP
1/2 PG-13, 125 minutes. Starts tonight at Mystic Luxury Cinemas, Stonington, Waterford, Westbrook and Lisbon. Starts Friday at Niantic. One of the nicest things about “AntMan,” the 2015 origin story of the eponymous Marvel superhero, was its modesty and congeniality: Sure, “Guardians of the Galaxy” had already come out, injecting welcome humor into a genre that had all but succumbed to self-seriousness and bellicosity. But as “Guardians” and, later, “Deadpool” doubled down on the snark, “Ant-Man” kept things light, its playfulness made all the more endearing by the boyish, twinkle-eyed persona of its star, Paul Rudd. Returning in the title role, Rudd brings those same exuberant values to bear on “Ant-Man and the Wasp,” which makes up in brio and adorability what it might lack in narrative complexity. As the movie opens, Rudd’s “real-life” alter ego, Scott Lang, is finishing up his house arrest since the mayhem of “Avengers: Civil War.” With only three days to go, he spends his time fooling around on his drum machine, practicing card tricks and amusing his daughter, Cassie (Abby Ryder Fortson), by staging pretend heists with Rube Goldberg-like contraptions and props. Ostensibly, Lang’s past life of crime will now be erased by the domestic duties of a single dad and the security firm he runs with his former cellmate, Luis (Michael Peña). But before the LoJack comes off, he’s drawn into another adventure with inventor Hank Pym (Michael Douglas), Pym’s daughter, Hope (Evangeline Lilly), and Hope’s long-lost mother, Janet, the Wasp in question who has been miniaturized and trapped for 30 years in the quantum realm, but who now might be capable of returning — with Ant-Man’s help, of course. The plot isn’t the thing in “Ant-Man and the Wasp,” which distracts viewers with the usual gizmos that light up, whir, shrinko-late and supersize with metronomic regularity, as well as a complement of credible bad guys, led by a toothy greed-head named Sonny Burch (Walton Goggins). The joys of the movie lie in its utterly gratuitous but amusing digressions, whether in the form of Rudd’s constant stream of witty asides, Peña’s motor-mouthed recollection of Lang’s emotional journey under the influence of truth serum, running gags involving close-up magic, Morrissey and the Russian fairy tale figure Baba Yaga, or a hilarious sequence involving a tiny Lang wearing a lost-and-found sweatshirt in an elementary school that puts a similar sight gag in “Deadpool 2” to shame. — Ann Hornaday, Washington Post
THE FIRST PURGE
1/2 R, 97 minutes. Opened Tuesday at Lisbon, Waterford. Opened Wednesday at Stonington and Westbrook. The latest “Purge” is an erratic, fairly absorbing and righteously angry prequel. It sets up scenarios in which African-American and Latino resistance fighters rebel against the dear white people exploiting them for bloody political gain. Honestly: There is no avoiding politics and messaging with that setup. When last we purged, two summers back with “The Purge: Election Year” (2016), our current president was a few months away from the White House. In various degrees of bluntness, screenwriter/director/executive producer James DeMonaco had a few things to say about the fear-mongering tactics that would ultimately put him there. Now, with a new DeMonaco script directed by second-time feature filmmaker Gerard McMurray, “The First Purge” imagines what went down, and why, with the initial 12-hour crimeand-murder spree allowing an angry, disenfranchised U.S. citizenry to blow off steam with zero consequences. For newbies: This is set a few short years in the future. The third-party American ruler represents the New Founding Fathers of America, backed by the National Rifle Association. The prequel has it that a nonpartisan behavioral scientist has designed the 12-hour societal “experiment” as a way of lessening the crime rate and providing a mass catharsis. Looking a little dazed, Marisa Tomei plays the scientist, Dr. Updale, so named presumably because Dr. Downhill was taken. The experiment unfolds on Staten Island, N.Y., and those participating in the purge receive $5,000 plus a bonus if they ramp up the bloodshed personally. Via the characters’ creepy blue surveillance contact lenses, we, the audience, witness the havoc they wreak. The first few seconds of screen time belong to the story’s stone-cold psycho (Rotimi Paul, truly scary as Skeletor). I took no pleasure in the block-party sequence where Skeletor randomly selects his next victims. (It’s vicious in a morally inert fashion.) But the franchise lives (or dies) on its own hypocrisy, shaking its head at a society encouraging such sickness while relishing the narrative possibilities. Neighborhood activist Nya (Lex Scott Davis, lately of “Superfly” and this film’s sole grace note amid the carnage) and her ex-lover, drug lord