Movie review by Michael Isenberg.
The trailer promised “The perfect summer movie.” Ant-Man and the Wasp delivered: it’s exciting, it’s heartwarming, and it’s very funny. Just don’t think about it too much. Summer’s not for thinking.
Scott passes the long hours playing the drums, learning close-up magic from Internet videos, and staging elaborate make-believe heists in which he and his daughter Cassie (Abby Ryder Fortson) crawl through ventilator shafts made of cardboard boxes and slither through laser grids made of string in order to “steal” his most precious possession: a trophy she had given him for his last birthday. It’s labeled “World’s Greatest Grandma.”
The time spent with Cassie, now about eight years old, is endearing, especially since for all we’ve heard about how she’s THE MOST IMPORTANT THING IN HIS LIFE, we’ve seen very little of them together.
Alas, playtime must come to end when Scott has a peculiar dream: he finds himself in the persona of Janet van Dyne (Michelle Pfeiffer), Pym’s wife and Hope’s mom, seeing through her eyes and sharing her memories. We heard about Janet in the original Ant-Man movie—she was Hank’s partner in superheroics, the first to wear the Wasp suit, until she shrunk too small, slipped between the molecules, and never came back. Shaken by his oh-too-real dream, Scott contacts Pym and Hope, who know instantly what happened. After Scott himself went subatomic and did come back, Pym thought that there might be a possibility that Janet is alive and could be recovered. He and Hope have been working on opening a tunnel to the subatomic realm. Somehow, their first test run has caused Scott and Janet to become quantum entangled (or ant-tangled). And so Pym and Hope bury their differences with Scott—not very deeply—and set out to work with him to bring Janet back.
The technology involved is quite advanced and absolutely everybody wants to get their hands on it. What follows is a standard MacGuffin-driven plot, with a twist—the MacGuffin is a building, Pym’s lab, reduced to rollerboard size by his shrinking technology, complete with wheels and telescoping handle.
Our first contestant is Ava (Hannah John-Kamen), who has been quantum shifted out of phase with our reality thanks to a lab accident. She is unable to grab hold of ordinary matter—hence her moniker “Ghost.” Albeit, when she wears the special suit (yes, another suit) engineered by her guardian and mentor Bill Foster (Laurence Fishburne), she turns into a formidable fighter. Foster and Ghost want to get their hands on Pym’s lab to shift Ava back.
Then there’s the shady arms dealer and restauranteur Sonny Burch (Walton Goggins) who wants to sell the technology on the black market.
Finally there’s FBI agent Jimmy Woo (Randall Park) who just wants to capture Hope and Pym and prove that Ant-Man has been sneaking away from his house arrest. Woo is mainly comic relief, and the humor is a little corny. He is constantly on the verge of catching Ant-Man away from home, only to burst into the house with a dozen agents and discover him there doing something comical like taking a bath. It reminded me of Dr. Bellows perpetually stymied efforts to catch Major Nelson in the 60s sitcom I Dream of Jeannie. I kept expecting Woo to blurt out Bellows’ catch phrase, “He’s done it to me again.”
As the lab bounces from hand to hand, there’s no shortage of action. Scott’s fighting style is humorous as he quips his way through a series of technical failures, always a little surprised when something actually works. In contrast, Hope is all sting as the Wasp. She seriously kicks ass.
Everything leads up to a big car chase through the streets of that marvelous car chase city, San Francisco. I thought I knew every chase scene trope there is, but Marvel threw me for a loop. Because the dynamics change completely when vehicles can shrink to matchbox size or be restored to their original dimensions at the touch of a button.
So, big fun. But like I said, don’t think about it too much. The science is mostly technobabble. Even the characters think so. Scott’s old partner in crime Luis (Michael Peña) asks whether the more technologically-oriented characters just put the word “quantum” in front of everything to sound scientific. Michael Peña would be excellent at Cinema Sins. By the way, he steals every scene that he’s in. (On the downside, his car horn plays La Cucaracha. C’mon, Marvel. That’s racist.)
Ant-Man and the Wasp also suffers from the absence of any real conflict. Ghost is a formidable ant-tagonist, but she really isn’t a bad person, and in any case there’s no reason why her interests are incompatible with Pym’s. As for Sonny and Woo, they never really pose a serious challenge to our heroes.
The trailer makes another promise: “The ending will ROCK. YOUR. WORLD.” They weren’t kidding. I literally gasped during the mid-credit scene—although upon reflection, I should have seen it coming. But if you want to find out what happens, you’ll have to see the movie. And if, after seeing it, you want more Ant-Man, be sure to check out the 2015 prose novel Natural Enemy, which I reviewed last week.
Michael Isenberg drinks bourbon and writes novels. His latest book, The Thread of Reason, is a murder mystery that takes place in Baghdad in the year 1092, and tells the story of the conflict between science and shari’ah in medieval Islam. It is available on Amazon.com
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