When the ants come marching in
If there’s one thing history teaches us about comedy, it’s that large props get a laugh. Ant-Man and the Wasp, the sequel to the unlikely Marvel hit Ant-Man starring Paul Rudd, takes that essential truth to the next level, sending our hero, Scott Lang and his sidekick Luis (Michael Peña), through downtown San Francisco in a car chase, releasing a refrigerator-sized Pez dispenser into the streets to take down pursuing bad guys on motorcycles. “You got Pezzed!” Luis exclaims.
It’s this kind of whiz-bang, throwaway humor that makes Ant-Man and the Wasp, again directed by Peyton Reed with writing contributions from Rudd, as watchable as the first. It’s a franchise that doesn’t mind being on the sidelines of the Big Superhero Epic Takedown Event that is the rest of the Marvel Cinematic Universe.
See, that’s because Lang becomes really, really small when he wears his Ant-Man suit. And sometimes he becomes really, really big (no spoiler: he did it in the earlier Captain America: Civil War). And sometimes, he becomes fifth-grader sized, as he does trying to retrieve a certain plastic trophy from Lang’s daughter’s classroom. He pulls off this caper with the assistance of Hope Pym (Evangeline Lilly), the Wasp in the title, who’s hoping to retrieve a certain USB-sized Ant-Man suit embedded in the base of a plastic “World’s Best Grandma” trophy. The duo needs this suit to rescue Janet van Dyne (Michelle Pfeiffer), mother of Hope and wife of Hope’s dad, Hank (Michael Douglas), the scientist who came up with this “shrinking suit” technology to begin with.
As we learn in literally the opening moments, Hank and Janet were on a government mission in 1987 Cold War days, trying to shrink themselves small enough to pass between the atoms in the hull of a menacing Soviet submarine. Janet shrinks too much though, and ends up going all subatomic: she ends up stuck in the same quantum realm that Scott Lang did at the end of Ant-Man, a place where there’s apparently no food or clean places to go to the bathroom. The reality of never bringing his wife back from that realm for 30 years has left Hank sad and conflicted in life — until he realizes he can construct a Quantum Tunnel and send somebody to the down-low once again to retrieve her.
If all of this sounds like complete hooey, even for a Marvel movie, consider that the script of Ant-Man and the Wasp is a soufflé tower constructed of sight gags, one-liners, pop cultural references and funny names (the security company run by Lang’s former cellmates, for example, is called X-Con Security), interspersed with really cool visuals of things getting really big or really small. Got it? With that mental adjustment dialed in, you can enjoy this Marvel entry, guilt- and logic-free.
Size matters: Paul Rudd and Evangeline Lilly pair up in this second Marvel installment.
Part of the implicit charm of the Ant-Man franchise is that Lang, or perhaps more accurately Rudd, is a huge fanboy of the Avengers. He casually refers to Captain America as “Cap,” the way Tony Stark does, after their little dustup in Berlin a few years back. This sets Hope’s eyebrow arching: “‘Cap’? You call him ‘Cap’?”
As we open on Lang, he’s playing “secret mission” with his young daughter Cassie in his home, where he’s under house arrest for violating some specific Federal statute after superhero-moonlighting in Berlin (a specific statute rattled off with amiable efficiency by FBI Agent Jimmy Woo, played by Fresh Off The Boat’s Randall Park). When he starts having weird dreams about Janet van Dyne, however, it appears she’s trying to communicate through him from the subatomic realm; Hank and Hope decide he might be needed for another Ant-Man mission, despite the ankle bracelet and Fed monitoring.
Enter the highly efficient, well-oiled ant colony of Dr. Hank Pym, ready to take up the daily house-bound activities of Scott Lang — which include playing synthesized drums, doing home karaoke (the Partridge Family theme song is a particular favorite), reading The Fault in Our Stars while weeping, and taking long, candlelit soaks. The ants — puffed up to Doberman size — act as decoys, wearing Scott’s ankle bracelet while he’s away. Voila, Lang is free to slip on the Ant-Man suit and head into danger again, this time with Hope wearing her mom’s old suit, i.e., becoming The Wasp. (“You have wings?” Lang says, enviously, when he first rides with her.)
Rudd has done a lifetime of Judd Apatow movies that has well prepared him for comedy, specifically the comedy of being a man-child, addicted to the things of youth. Part of the film’s charm is its focus on toys ‘n’ things people of Rudd’s generation might have grown up with, such as Hot Wheels cars. And there’s a long interlude about Morrissey, and his particular resonance among the LA Latino community, that sounds like it came straight from the pen of music-obsessed Rudd, maybe with an assist from Peña.
Lilly is a perfect foil for Rudd’s puppy-dog, “good dad” demeanor. She’s clear-eyed while still playing arch — the competent adult in the room to Rudd’s shoulder-shrugging everyman — and while their attraction is still played for G-rated laughs, there’s a certain chemistry there. Peña does his motormouth routine again, reciting a very long story that his co-actors lip sync to, which is still a comic kick.
There are other complications involving Hank’s former S.H.I.E.L.D. colleague, Professor Bill Foster (Laurence Fishburne), and his connection to shape-shifting villainess Ava Starr/Ghost (Hannah John-Kamen); but this stuff just feels like extra credit material possibly leading back to the MCU arc. In fact, the post-credits scene itself leads back to a certain mega-big-deal Avengers entry we saw earlier this summer, and its cliffhanger ending. It explains, perhaps, Ant-Man’s absence from that franchise behemoth.
Operating largely on the Marvel sidelines (not unlike Peter Parker), in Ant-Man, Paul Rudd may have found the role of a lifetime: playing a dude who plays outside the rules a little bit, who gets to dwell in his own man cave of childish pleasures, whip off G-rated one-liners (as opposed to Apatow R-rated screeds), and even hang out with Marvel superheroes on occasion. Sometimes, life just works out like that.
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