As Scott Lang awaits expiration of his term of house detention, Hope van Dyne and Dr. Hank Pym involve him in a scheme to rescue Mrs. van Dyne from the micro-universe into which she has fallen, whi...
Whether you’re a Marvel fan or not, it’s hard to admit that “Infinity War” didn’t leave you itching for the next Marvel movie; we all wanted to see what else was going on in the universe after that insane finale. Next up in the saga is this year’s “Ant-Man and The Wasp” starring Paul Rudd and Evangeline Lilly reprising their title roles from the first “Ant-Man” (2015), one of my personal Marvel favorites. After refreshing our memories about the first film’s ending, this sequel establishes its place in the Marvel timeline as happening right after “Civil War” (2016); Scott Lang (Rudd) is under house arrest after breaking the law by helping Captain America escape arrest in Germany. With his former mentor Dr. Pym (Michael Douglas) and Hope (Lilly) angry at him, Lang is left only to the occasional company of his daughter and his best friend Luis (Michael Peña). Here we get a sequence that evokes “Ferris Bueller’s Day Off” as Lang peruses his house completely alone and desperately bored. These aren’t the funniest moments in the entire movie — there are better and worse gags to deal with. If we’re honest, we expect a full-on comedy whenever Ant-Man is on screen, and while “Ant-Man and The Wasp” is not as funny or tidy as the first one, it operates on the perfectly light tone that always makes for a fun watch.
Much of the plot revolves around getting Pym’s wife, Janet (Michelle Pfeiffer) out of the “quantum realm” — and we get a heap of science-talk to explain this — but we soon find that the villain, Ghost (Hannah John-Kamen), is after Janet as well. Ghost suffers from a condition that makes her molecules unstable causing her to walk through solid matter with barely any control over herself. She thinks that transferring some of Janet’s built-up quantum energy will give her the stability she craves, but at the possible cost of Janet’s life. Comparing Ant-Man’s two villains so far, Ghost is far less menacing to the superhero than Darren Cross/ Yellowjacket (Corey Stoll), but John-Kamen’s performance overflows with a subtle evil that’s way more intriguing than Stoll’s almost cartoon-level villainy. We also get another villain here in Sonny Birch (Walton Goggins) a twangy and vague black-market dealer who wants Pym’s precious lab to sell to “his people”. He’s a questionable addition to the mix, taking away some of Ghost’s impact, but his ocassional presence does instigate some truly great action sequences.
There’s no shortage of witty banter in the middle of the action, of course, but not enough of it works to propel this to the humorous heights of its predecessor. Jokes falter here when they’re dragged on for too long — Peña’s Luis — and his bumbling cronies — had a perfect amount of screentime in the first one, but here he’s sometimes held onto for a minute too long. As for Ant-Man’s new partner, The Wasp, she’s awesome; her first fight with Birch’s thugs is one of the best scenes in the entire movie, and the biggest problem with her is that there simply wasn’t enough! We (sadly) barely get to see the duo fight side-by-side, but whenever they do, it’s expertly executed...which is why we needed more.
Part of the problem with this is due to weight. “Ant-Man” was a swift heist movie that didn’t take time explaining away its phenomenons, but the sequel feels much more lethargic as we’re given multiple backstories and quantum physics lessons along the way. These secenes aren’t total disasters, though, because we almost always have Paul Rudd poignantly speaking the audience’s mind (“Do you guys just put ‘quantum’ in front of everything?”) — something that’s often missing in the Marvel Universe.
