The latest film is worthwhile but not a must-see.
Spider-Man, Ant-Man: Who knew insects could be so entertaining? The way the Marvel team is going, it won’t even be a surprise when Roach Motel: The Movie turns out to be the must-see blockbuster of 2021.
The latest arthropod epic, Ant-Man and the Wasp, marks a detour from the main action of the Marvel movies, which took a worrying (but actually not all that worrying) turn in the climactic moments of Avengers: Infinity War, during which several stalwart heroes found themselves facing a kind of cosmic Etch-a-Sketch. The 20th film in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, the kicky new offering is a lesser, and skippable, entry, not as cleanly engineered as 2015’s superb Ant-Man but a notch better than Thor: Ragnarok.
Still, though middling for a Marvel flick, Ant-Man and the Wasp makes for an amusing multiplex excursion with its agreeable mix of digital spectacle and laughs. It’s a bit short on character and a bit long on nerdutronic comic-book gobbledygook explanations for everything, but it does have a sharp, quippy script and not one but two bouncy reprises of the theme song from The Partridge Family. A single instance would have been fully sufficient to make my day, but I’m a child of the Seventies.
Scott Lang (Paul Rudd, who is also one of the five screenwriters credited) is after his previous capers a few days shy of serving out a two-year sentence of house arrest monitored by ankle bracelet. A dream introduces Scott to Janet (Michelle Pfeiffer), the disappeared wife of his former mentor Dr. Hank Pym (Michael Douglas). She was lost for 30 years when, while saving thousands disarming an inbound missile, she went from insect-sized to “sub-molecular” — a one-way journey to a sci-fi netherland called the “quantum zone.” Much highly technical discussion about the details ensues. Scott: “Do you guys just put ‘quantum’ in front of everything?”
The upshot is that Scott is a conduit to Janet’s thoughts (Rudd gets to pretend he is Pfeiffer for a while), through which she can help Hank and his daughter Hope (Evangeline Lilly), now tricked out with a flying version of the Ant-Man suit, bring back Janet from the quantum zone. Villainy stands in their way, however: A sleazy restaurateur/black marketer (Walton Goggins) keeps stealing Hank’s laboratory building. Hank has unwisely shrunken it down to the size of a wheelie bag, which makes it really quite easy to steal.
The other villain, Ava (Hannah John-Kamen), is a protégé of a figure from Hank’s past. Her molecules keep coming unglued and sliding her around different planes of existence, an effect the lads in the digital department render by displaying her in hokey double and triple exposures, hence her nom de superhero “Ghost.” Really, “Blur” would have been a better name. She isn’t scary. She figures that stealing quantum kilojoules or something from Janet’s quantum life force will be her ticket to her quantumly quantum molecular re-cohesion. The movie spends a lot of time explaining all this, too, via lots of the kind of comic-book-nerd speak that reminded me of why comic books went out of fashion in the first place: too many lapses of imagination papered over by silly jargon. Oh, and though Janet has been floating around the quantum zone since the shoulderpads-and-wine-coolers era, she has to be rescued right now, within the next two hours, which is about how much time the screenwriters spent cobbling together all of this expository drivel.
The wry self-questioning of its own contrivances makes the film impossible not to like.
The climax follows the same toddler-empties-toybox model of a lot of other Marvel movies: Some things get massively inflated, some stuff gets shrunk, and back and forth and round and around, amid lots of hectic racing around San Francisco. In the midst of all this, the priceless Michael Peña, who plays Scott’s pal and should be in every movie, keeps things grounded by channeling the audience’s boyish wonder (“I wish I had a suit,” he says). Also, there’s a giant Pez dispenser used as a weapon. When a villain makes an inexplicable sudden getaway via ferry, Scott wonders, “How did he even have time to buy a ticket?” It’s the kind of thing I always wonder, too, and the wry self-questioning of its own contrivances makes the film impossible not to like.
So Ant-Man and the Wasp is worthwhile, if not a must-see, appealing less for its thundering action than for its throwaway gags. By the end there’s a suggestion that Pym’s gift for shrinking and enlarging could lead to a triumph over one of the most implacable scourges imaginable; he and his ladylove take a townhouse the size of a box of Triscuits out of their gear, pop it on the beach, and then blow it up to normal townhouse size.
Presto, but of course the enemy will not be denied a response. So I look forward to the next chapter, Ant-Man vs. the San Francisco Zoning Regulations.