Ant-Man and the Wasp (2018)

Directed by Peyton Reed

Written by Chris McKenna, Erik Sommers, Paul Rudd, Andrew Barrer, & Gabriel Ferrari

The first Ant-Man is a surprising story about how an incredibly troubled production can sometimes still lead to a pleasant, enjoyable film. Ant-Man and the Wasp is a story about how lightning never strikes twice. Booting three of its screenwriters and replacing them with a third of the team responsible for Homecoming‘s schizophrenia and two in-house Marvel script guys turned out to not be such a great idea for this unfortunate sequel. Peyton Reed proves to be no stronger than the script he’s working with, and is unequal to the task of elevating the mess of a story here to anything very entertaining. The film is deceptively pleasant, so much so that I overlooked many of its problems upon initial viewing, but returning to it has made them all too apparent. The story is a sequel to both the first Ant-Man as well as the character’s appearance in Civil War, but has nothing to do with the MCU movie that immediately preceded it, Infinity War. It finds Scott Lang doing time under house arrest as part of a plea deal for helping Captain America break the Sokovia Accords. The Pyms have cut ties with him, and he’s trying to start a new life as a security consultant. He is suddenly afflicted, however, with visions of his time in the quantum realm at the end of his previous film. These visions seem to be associated with Hank Pym’s lost wife Janet, who may still be alive. This vision ignites a new race to obtain science McGuffins in order to save Hope, all while dealing with new threats: a murderous southern arms dealer (Walton Goggins) and a strange assassin called Ghost (Hannah John-Kamen) who can phase through solid material. It all ends in a race against multiple clocks and in search of multiple hot-potato objects around San Francisco.

This movie is a huge mess structurally. This was only the second time I had seen it, and it began to come apart almost immediately upon a rewatch. I remembered thinking of it with mild fondness, in much the same way I think about the first, but the two could not be further apart. This one tries to coast by on the affability and fun of the first film, but there are just too many structural issues for any of it to hold up at all. First, there’s the problem of the main character. He does absolutely nothing that matters in any way for the first 70 minutes of what is basically a 110 minute movie. He’s got some nice dialogue and a few character moments, but he is entirely incidental to the plot of the film, and that is not a good foundation for a movie. Everything that he ‘contributes’ not only could be done by someone else, but the movie would actually be better and make more sense if it were done by someone else. On top of being generally ineffectual, his character has been taken from “out of his depth” to “complete idiot,” which are strikingly different characterizations when you’re watching the movie. Throughout most of the proceedings, he seems like a legitimate idiot, when he is supposed to (at very least) be an incredibly competent cat burglar, security expert, and electrician. All of that is gone for this movie. And if that weren’t bad enough, the other characterizations are all over the place too. In addition to Scott Lang’s sudden conversion into an imbecile, there’s still a really weird attempt at a love story between him and Hope van Dyne, and it just does not work at all. The two have no chemistry whatsoever, and every time they try to make them work it makes me feel squicky. Dr. Foster always seems to have exactly as much moral fiber as any particular scene needs him to have, which leaves him feeling like a total non-entity in the plot with no clear motivation or drive. Dr. Pym is a huge jerk to everyone, with none of the tender moments he was capable of in the last movie until the very last scene of this one. Everyone seems to be reduced to a single character trait, with no additional complexity allowed.

Special mention must be made of the structural horror show that is the film’s finale. Not only is it a far cry from the well-executed heist of the first film, but it also makes almost no sense in terms of who is where and when. The previous movie had a really cool heist as its centerpiece. There was a thing that needed to be stolen and a skilled team that made that happen. They had multiple different kinds of ants and multiple different kinds of people, each with a special skill and a part to play in achieving the goal of getting the thing. This movie is the complete opposite of that well-ordered structure. It does nothing with the ants whatsoever, and they have no personality. They use big ants too much (because people liked that in the first one, remember?), and they do nothing interesting except carry stuff and hold people (who are obviously pretending to respond to a green tennis ball) at bay. There’s nothing at all for Kurt or Dave to do (and I had to look up their names just to remember what they were), except to show up apparently instantaneously once they see what’s happening on TV and take care of some villains who were already pretty definitively taken care of by the plot of the movie. Our heroes end up surrounded, but then they’re not; in fact, they’re all over town in different places to pull off a nonsensical plan to get Scott back home. How did they get there? How does any of it work? This movie just hopes you won’t ask because watching Paul Rudd run around in his underwear is funny. In abandoning the well-scripted heist motif of the first movie for the more generic Marvel action romp, the film deprives many of its characters of anything meaningful to do. Laurence Fishburne’s Dr. Foster just disappears until the plot needs him back, then he just shows back up. The whole thing is a mess. It clearly wants to be highly coordinated and interesting: there are elements of the setup that remind of Inception, with Dr. Pym coming up from within the quantum tunnel while the building is being carried around in the ‘level’ above, so to speak. This creative team is not Christopher Nolan, though, and the whole thing just feels like chaos and happenstance.

The movie is not completely without merit (although I see how my rant could be construed that way). There are some fun shrinking and enlarging moments, although basically all of them were spoiled in the movie’s marketing materials. The chemistry between Paul Rudd and Abby Ryder Fortson, who plays his daughter, is still excellent. She’s great in every scene, and her sense of hurt when her dad doesn’t want her to be his sidekick still really gets me. Randall Park as Agent Woo is a legitimately funny reversal of the super-competent (and confident) government agent that I enjoy as well. And special notice should be paid to David Dastmalchian, whose Baba Yaga joke is absolutely the funniest part of the entire movie. It’s just that every one of those things feels like an isolated incident floating in a sea of mechanical ineptitude. I admire what they were trying to do with making a villain who wasn’t all that villainous, but it deprives us of anyone to root against other than Walton Goggins’ pathetic Sonny Burch, who seems more deserving of pity than spite by the end of things. He’s completely ineffectual, and that leaves no real threat to our heroes, depriving the movie of any real stakes or tension. The whole thing is regrettable, really. This should have been the movie for Evangeline Lilly to shine as the Wasp, and/or for Scott to finally come into his own as a hero, but it’s none of that. A sincere disappointment that had the best of intentions but not the ability to fulfill them.

Overall:

Stray Thoughts:

• Baby Scott Lang is adorable, but I couldn’t stop thinking about how unnecessary the whole plot was at that point.
• I really feel like they had no idea what to do with Luis in this movie. He was a fan favorite, but they clearly couldn’t figure out how he would still be involved in the plot here. The rehash of his storytelling gimmick in the first one seems shoehorned in and unnatural here. Michael Peña remains an amazing actor and he does everything he can with the material, but there’s not much there.
• There’s so much info-dumping and technobabble in this movie, and its all so unnecessary. The five minute long recap of the entire previous movie at the beginning grates as well.
• I really, really don’t like Paul Rudd’s impression of Janet van Dyne when she’s possessing his body. I get what they were going for, but it doesn’t work for me. It seems too jokey, maybe? Too mincing? It seems like a man doing a bad impression of a stereotype of a woman, and I really don’t like it.
• The moment that the filming of the movie tells us is the ‘big noble sacrifice’ scene is nothing of the sort. Scott accidentally passes out, with no knowledge that he’s really risking anything, but all of the film cues tell us that this is the dramatic moment of him giving up everything to save the day. It’s like going subatomic but with no volition or emotional impact.
• Post Credits scene 1: Shocking, to a degree, and definitely makes clear the tie between this movie and Infinity War, although it also raises some questions that may eventually be answered in Endgame.
• Post Credits scene 2: A total waste of time, maybe the worst one of these.
• Stan Lee cameo: A really really funny one. Stan Lee definitely lived a life, and this makes oblique reference to that while also being a really well-timed joke. Not my favorite of these, but one of the funniest.