I’m ashamed to say that when I yacked on about the first Ant-Man movie, I completely failed to mention how much I liked Evangeline Lilly’s Hope van Dyne. She was not given remotely enough to do, but she was a fun piece of attitude in every scene she had, and she got to punch Paul Rudd in the nose, which was more satisfying than it should have been. So it’s good news that she’s got more to do in Ant-Man and the Wasp, to the point where you could argue that it ought to be called The Wasp, featuring Ant-Man.
So, there’s that, but the other big improvement over the first movie is that the stakes are personal. Everyone is just trying to do one simple thing. They’re not trying to save the world; they’re not even paying a huge amount of attention to the world. Henry Pym and Hope van Dyne are trying to save Janet van Dyne, the original Wasp, Hank’s wife and Hope’s mother, from being stuck in the “quantum zone”. We will pass in silence over the sheer lunacy of the idea that you can be stuck in the sub atomic realm for thirty years and still be intact, let alone sane, and simply enjoy the fact that people in a Marvel movie are pursuing a simple, human-scaled objective which does not involve daddy-issues. They rope in Ant-Man, and then other people get pulled into the mess, and there’s lots of stunts and ridiculous physics, but they never ever lose sight of what they’re trying to achieve, and so the stunts feel like they’re happening in pursuit of the story, instead of the story having been hammered into shape around the stunts.
Which means that it’s a fun movie. It’s not as much fun as Deadpool, but it’s the only Marvel thing I’ve seen which even comes close. The physics of Ant-Man’s world are preposterous but if they keep the gags coming you can forgive a lot of it. Touchingly, they keep trying to salvage the unsalvageable. Hank and Hope have a secret lab which they can compact down to the size of a rolling suitcase. Naturally it get stolen and then chucked from hand to hand, which you’d think would have the same effect as an earthquake, but luckily they remembered to "switch on the gyroscopic stabilisers” before they shrank it! The other nice thing is that they don’t have some implacable villain; the Ghost is someone boxed into doing bad things to save herself, and Walton Goggins' slimy financier [1] is wonderfully small time and inept, while the government stooges are charmingly well-meaning and beleaguered. There’s no-one to root against, just lots of people to enjoy. Michael Pena’s motormouth character Luis is back and just anchors every scene he’s in. There’s something so lived in about his character that he retrospectively makes Paul Rudd’s Scott more believable as a person as well. Rounding out the cast and proving that eventually everyone who has ever lived will be in a Marvel movie, Michelle Pfeiffer joins Michael Douglas. Neither is really acting, but they do class the place up a bit. Michael Douglas may not be acting at all; he’s just a little too good at being a grumpy old man.
So, it’s a fun light-hearted movie and makes a nice change from the last Marvel-a-thon. Right up until it doesn’t. Spoilers, I suppose. You know the way they keep putting credits sequences into the end of Marvel movies to throw in a gag or lighten the tone? What if they kept doing that until we were used to it, and then used one to switch the tone completely in a fun movie? Ant-Man, meet Thanos. It’s brilliantly done. Took them 20 movies, but it was worth it. It has more of an impact than the big dust-off at the end of Infinity War. It comes out of the blue, and it hits people that we’ve got happy to be around. That’s how you do a shock ending. Do more of that.
[1] As continues to be the tradition in Hollywood, Goggins is playing someone who should have been executed 24 hours ago, this time for crimes against style.
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