If the Marvel Cinematic Universe is basically an epic TV show, “Ant-Man and the Wasp” shows Marvel has no qualms about making a throwaway episode. You make two of the biggest cultural events of the year, and then you follow it up with a breezy family comedy with Paul Rudd?
Does anyone else feel like they’ve been cheated into watching a two-hour commercial for “Avengers 4?” And I’ll say upfront, anyone hoping for a juicy post-credits stinger will be sorely let down.
It’s a shame, because “Ant-Man and the Wasp” could be charming if it didn’t also carry the burden of being a Marvel movie. For everything about Peyton Reed’s film that reminds you of an indie darling, all the action and exposition make the whole package feel slight as a superhero movie.
In the same way “Captain America: Winter Soldier” did not suddenly become “Three Days of the Condor” by casting Robert Redford, “Ant-Man and the Wasp” did not suddenly become a Judd Apatow movie because it decided to saddle Ant-Man with a daughter and a dopey best friend.
It does not have significant themes about what it is to be a parent or a present friend or father. Like every Marvel movie before it, “Ant-Man and the Wasp” pays lip service to these ideas. And instead, the first significant child in Marvel movies makes this one feel especially cutesy and heavy-handed. And the comic-relief moments from Michael Pena are mostly tacked on.
Make “Ant-Man and the Wasp” all screwball in the vein of Taika Waititi’s “Thor: Ragnarok” or the “Guardians of the Galaxy” films, or even go the other way and play Ant-Man’s parenting dilemmas for drama, and you might make what “Ant-Man and the Wasp” does right matter more.
The film begins with Scott (Rudd) on house arrest after the events of “Captain America: Civil War.” It explains why he was sidelined in “Infinity War.” But days before he’ll be released, he has a vision of Hank Pym’s wife Janet (Michelle Pfeiffer). She’s been trapped in a microscopic universe called the Quantum Realm, and Hank (Michael Douglas) and Hope (Evangeline Lilly) are trying to open a portal to reach her.
Trying to steal Hank’s portable lab and tap into the power of the Quantum Realm first is Ghost (Hannah John-Kamen), a young woman who can phase-shift between dimensions and needs Janet in order to save her own life. Only the second female Marvel villain, she’s surprisingly sympathetic and walks the line of being fully evil.
Also trying to steal Pym’s lab is Sonny Burch (Walton Goggins), a slick-talking, Southern gentleman of an arms dealer who believes that Quantum energy could be the next Crypto-Currency. Sure. That’s a buzzword that feels relevant, right? To a degree, director Reed knows how silly this dialogue is. “Do you guys just put Quantum in front of everything,” Scott says at one point. But a lot of this pseudo-science is supposed to feed directly into the next “Avengers” movie, so “Ant-Man and the Wasp” can’t be as tongue-in-cheek as it should be.
Yet that doesn’t stop it from trying. There’s a long sequence where Pena is hopped up on “truth serum” and rattles off the whole history of the last movie, his voice dubbing for a fast-talking Rudd and Lilly. It’s a hilarious aside, but that’s exactly what it is, a distraction, a break from the action. What I would give for this franchise to be in the hands of Edgar Wright or someone else capable of making “Ant-Man feel in touch with itself rather than flitting between genres.
That certainly doesn’t sound like an essential superhero movie in the biggest franchise of all time on the way toward a satisfying conclusion. “Ant-Man and the Wasp” is an admirable sequel, but it’s skippable.
2 ½ stars