Ant-Man & The Wasp ★★★

Words & Illustrations by Mark Holland

Marvel have been on a really good run of late, the gargantuan movie studio has been releasing films thick and fast in recent years (AM&TW marks their third release in 2018) and their most recent output hasn’t just seen them garner their biggest commercial successes, but also their biggest hits with the critics as well. The original Ant-Man came out three years ago and visionary director Edgar Wright was famously fired during production, the film that was released was an incredibly middling and bang-average affair that looked more like it had been conceived in a board meeting. Since then, Marvel has been hiring more and more innovative directors and then actually allowing them to have more creative input. This has resulted in some the franchise’s best films, from Scott Derrickson’s mind-bending Doctor Strange, to Taika Waititi’s wacky space opera Thor: Ragnarok and Ryan Coogler’s afrofuturist smash-hit Black Panther.

The Big Daddy though came earlier this year, with the release of Avengers: Infinity War. This was the huge culmination of 18 films and 76 named characters that were all battling it out for a bit of screen time. It made over 2 billion dollars at the global box office and is currently the highest ever grossing superhero film and the fourth highest grossing film of all time. But aside from all this, it managed to beat the odds and astonishingly it managed to be good, and not in a good-for-a-marvel film kind of way either, but in a way that it was really, properly good. So how does the studio follow up the release of their biggest ever film? The answer it would seem is to make one of the smallest.

This isn’t a bad thing at all really and Ant-Man does benefit from the low-stakes and the more compact story lines away from the wider universe of alien raccoons and thunder gods. We begin with Paul Rudd’s Scott Lang on house arrest following the events of Civil War and there’s some sweet scenes with him trying to entertain his daughter whilst he’s stuck at home in his loft. Ant-Man’s USP is that his films are more all-out comedies and they deal with more human-sized problems on less of a grand scale. The extended scenes of Rudd improvising, usually with his mate Luiz (Michael Pena) were quite grating in the first film, but here they find a nice rhythm and they’re integrated better with the action stuff.

There’s also the addition of Evangeline Lily’s The Wasp, which marks the first time a female character has headlined a Marvel film and had their name appear in the title. This looked a bit like Marvel was making a quick grab for some diversity, to jump on the success of last year’s Wonder Woman and that they were just throwing in a female sidekick as a last minute rush to appear progressive. This isn’t the case though and The Wasp is a fully formed character who’s as interesting, funny and important to the story as her male partner.

Ant-Man and The Wasp don’t actually have any superpowers themselves but, like Iron Man or Batman, their powers come from their suits. Their insectile names tell us that they have the ability to shrink down to minuscule sizes, which can be quite limiting in terms of offering inventive action sequences. The pair also have the power to alter the size of other objects too, by zapping things and making them either really big or really small. This is the ability that has the power to inject more comedic potential and more creativity into proceedings and these are the scenes that utilise this are the most memorable. There’s a great sequence that puts these shrinking powers to use, during a car chase through the streets of San Francisco that plays out like Steve McQueen’s Bullitt by way of The Borrowers.

Ant-Man & The Wasp is perfectly fine, it uses what worked with the first one and plays to its strengths. The plot doesn’t manage to remain very coherent but it zips along just fine, clever action sequences and some enjoyable performances make it a fun and flashy, if a bit forgettable, romp.