Ant-Man and the Wasp was given a huge responsibility. Being the MCU follow-up to Avengers: Infinity War was no small task. Infinity War, to give you no new information, is almost universally considered one of the best (if not the best) Marvel movie to date. Add in the emotional weight it had, and you could argue expectations have never been higher for the Marvel films. So what did Kevin Feige and Marvel Studios give us the next entry? The Ant-Man sequel, a movie about as opposite as you can get from Infinity War. And it turns out that’s exactly what we needed.
Ant-Man and the Wasp is as light as any other MCU movie. And it has arguably the lowest stakes of any of the 20 movies. The result? One of the more fun movies Marvel has put out. There are certainly some negatives, which I’ll get to, but for the most part it’s two hours of a good time. Since there are so few, I’ll get the weak points out of the way first.
It has been a popular opinion of late that Marvel has fixed its villain problem. Spider-Man: Homecoming, Black Panther, and Infinity War all had excellent villains. It sure did seem like Marvel may have found a solution to what easily might have been their biggest ongoing issue. But opponents of that thought can point to Ant-Man and the Wasp as hard evidence against it.
Ghost legitimately might be the worst villain in the entire MCU. And it might be because she’s not really even a villain. At the most basic understanding, she could be considered one simply because she opposes the movie’s protagonists. But she doesn’t have some big evil plan she’s trying to execute. Her goal is very singular and personal. It makes it so there are essentially zero stakes outside of the core group of characters. Her motivations were also lacking. I won’t get into specifics, but there are other people for her to place the blame on other than who she ultimately settled on. Al non-fighting scenes with Ghost were pretty bad; they brought the movie to a grinding halt. Fortunately there weren’t too many of those where it didn’t take away from the overall fun of the movie all that much.
One of the problems with the villains is that instead of focusing on developing one strong central villain, the film underdeveloped two weaker villains. Walton Goggins plays Sonny Burch, a generic-as-they-come “bad guy.” Again, to remain completely spoiler free I can’t say too much about him. But suffice it to say he was pretty much useless. To his credit, Goggins is fantastic (because of course) with what he’s given. It’s just a shame an actor this awesome was wasted.
With such weak villains it shouldn’t come as much of a surprise that the plot wasn’t great either. You might say the movie went too low with the stakes this time around. The main story follows Hank Pym, Hope Van van Dyne, and Scott Lang working to try to bring back Hank’s wife Janet from the quantum realm. Ghost and Burch are there to make this more difficult, and nothing more.
You might think that a weak plot and bad antagonists would lead to a movie not being very good. And I would say normally you would be right. But the first Ant-Man, and now the sequel, prove that there are ways around that, provided you know what you’re doing. To start with, the action and effects were awesome. There are a couple great car chase scenes and every fight was a thrill to watch.
One reason the special effects worked so well was that the movie didn’t overuse the shrinking/enlarging effects, which was a worry of mine going into it. And they found new and creative (and maybe most importantly, fun) ways to use those effects. Even though they showed some of the better moments in the trailers, that didn’t take away from when you saw them play out in the movie.
As great as the action scenes were, the movie makes its bones with the cast. Paul Rudd Paul Rudds all over the place and his performance is everything you would expect it to be. Michael Peña is fantastic again, and . He continues to be one of the better and funnier characters in the MCU. I would love to see him show up in more of the movies. He could easily have a small role in Avengers 4 that would fit and make sense. Outside of any future Ant-Man movies, he wouldn’t need to have a huge role in other movies. But having him pop up here and there could be lots of fun. And with the start of his and Lang new security company, there might be ways to involve him even if Lang were not to appear in that particular movie.
Abby Ryder Fortson, who plays Lang’s daughter Cassie, was given an expanded role. And she killed it. It’s always a dice roll when you give young child actors larger roles, but here it was absolutely the correct call. She’s adorable, funny, and showed some surprising range for someone so young (she’s only 10). She stole every scene she was in.
As great as everyone else was, Randall Park was the real surprise hit as FBI agent Jimmy Woo. I somehow didn’t know he was in the movie, so it was a welcome surprise when he was first shown on screen. He was superb and hilarious in all his scenes. Like Peña’s Luis, Agent Woo could easily slide into a recurring role for future MCU films, much like Agent Coulson in the early movies. And besides, nobody would complain about getting more Randall Park in their lives.
Lastly, the credit scenes. Yes, there are two. The first one is a must-watch and that’s all I can say. The second one comes after all the credits have run and is completely skippable. It’s kind of fun but it doesn’t add anything to the movie or the MCU as a whole. If you have time to wait, you might as well stick around. But you’re not missing anything if you want to leave after the mid-credits scene.
Movie: Ant-Man and the Wasp Starring: Paul Rudd, Evangeline Lilly, Michael Douglas, Michael Peña, Walton Goggins, Hannah John-Kamen Genre: Action, superhero, comedy Rated: PG-13 for sci-fi action/violence, mild language My rating: 86/100
