It was nice to have a Marvel movie again that was basically pure fun. Black Panther was certainly strong (and most people seemed to like Avengers: Infinity War more than me), but humor was definitely the garnish to those movies and not the main course. I was ready for something more along the lines of the 2017 slate (Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2, Spider-Man: Homecoming, Thor: Ragnarok), and was fairly sure Ant-Man and the Wasp was going to fit the bill. It terms of tone, it certainly did.
In terms of quality, Ant-Man and the Wasp had a real double-edged sword of a plot going. It's all about the efforts to rescue Janet Van Dyne (Hank's wife and Hope's mother) from the Quantum Realm. On the plus side, I loved the scale of that. (That's not a shrinking pun). Our heroes aren't trying to save the entire world, they're trying to save one person who they care about on a very personal level. It's a story line that comes organically from character, and might be the most character-driven story in a Marvel movie. That's all great.
On the minus side, this personal story is inextricably woven with a mountain of silly technobabble. Scott Lang even comments on this at one point in the movie, making for a good laugh line, but ultimately not changing the fact that the execution of this very personal story feels quite impersonal at times. Since Doctor Strange's arrival in the Marvel universe, I'm just not sure that there needs to be this much phony explanation behind what we're seeing, particularly when one of the main characters doesn't understand it himself.
Still, the framework does serve well to provide exactly what I'd hoped: Ant-Man and the Wasp is a funny and entertaining movie. The jokes land well, largely thanks to two people in particular. Paul Rudd has crazy-ridiculous chemistry with everyone in the movie, especially Evangeline Lilly, Abby Ryder Fortson as his daughter Cassie, and Randall Park as the agent monitoring him. And again, as in the first film, Michael Peña steals every scene he's in with high energy and great timing. (One of the best scenes of the whole movie riffs on his machine gun delivery to hilarious effect.)
The action is pretty solid too, and here it's other performers who get to shine. Evangeline Lilly gets to kick a lot of ass this time around. And Hannah John-Kamen (well-known to anyone who watches Killjoys) is a potent adversary as Ghost. The action feels quite clever and specific to this movie; they get a lot of mileage out of shrinking/enlarging gags that you couldn't really do in another Marvel movie, plus phasing trickery with Ghost.
Sitting largely outside the action, Michael Douglas still adds fun to the proceedings. This time, we have Laurence Fishburne and Michelle Pfeiffer as well, forming the trio that definitely carries what drama the movie does have. (Side note: the "de-aging" CG effects that keeps showing up in these Marvel movies does keep getting better and better. The flashback scenes here showing these actors as we knew them to look in the 1980s is more convincing than ever.)
I didn't quite enjoy Ant-Man and the Wasp as much as the first Ant-Man. Still, I'd say it falls in the bottom of the window I'd call a B+. But surely Marvel already has its hook set in you and you'll be seeing it no matter what I say, right?
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