The best thing about Ant-Man as a superhero is ‘size’. While most superheroes in the Marvel canon tend to go for big and bigger threats, Ant-Man revels in operations that are tiny compared to his comrades.
His strength is again, size, which helps him shift himself so quickly that each of his punches and kicks can land with different intensities on his adversaries. He can become small, reduce himself to subatomic level, or he can go big, inflating himself to the size of a tower.
This quirk of an idea gets quite adeptly illustrated by Peyton Reed who seems to be finding his groove in the sequel after being the last-minute hire to direct Ant-Man (2015) replacing Edgar Wright.
Reed who has developed quite a reputation for his comedic knack, infuses the film with a relaxed charm, finding laughter in the mundane, and a childish whimsy in action sequences. Of course, having a cast on the same playful page helps.
The film opens with a backstory of CGI-coaxed young Michael Douglas and Michelle Pfeiffer as Hank Pym and Janet Van Dyne, the original Ant-Man and the Wasp, before they passed the baton to the young ones. To save the world from a major threat, Pfeiffer’s Janet shrinks herself to a size so tiny that she disappears into the quantum realm for decades.
Scott Lang (Paul Rudd) as we know returned from the quantum realm in the first part which shines a light on the collective hope of Hank, and his daughter Hope (Evangeline Lilly). But there’s a problem. Scott can’t step out of his four walls. Reason? Well, the last time we saw him in Captain America: Civil War (2016), he created a ruckus in Germany breaking international laws and thanks to that he is now under house arrest.
Now Hank, Scott and Hope must team up to get Janet back from dreaded subatomic world of the quantum realm.
If this “quantum realm” talk is taking your goat, you’re with Scott who voices the audience’s exasperation, “Do you guys just put ‘quantum’ in front of everything you say?”
Since we are in a superhero universe, there have to be villains, who come in the form of Walton Goggins and Hannah John-Kamen. But Reed’s directorial eye is more invested in comedy, so Goggins’ Sonny Burch turns into a lowlife you laugh at, and Hannah John-Kamen’s Ghost is a figure you deeply empathise with, because her ordeal is not to destroy the world, but just to save her own life.
Ant-Man and The Wasp reflects a sharp departure from the bombast of Avengers: Infinity War, doling out a film that’s happy in its universe of shrink and grow. Perhaps this is also a strategic win for Marvel who keep reinventing the wheel of superhero narratives.
The script by Chris McKenna, Erik Sommers, Andrew Barrer, Gabriel Ferrari and Rudd himself, is quite easy on the eyes despite its multiple cooks. The writing grounds its leading man in the everyday worries of a father and Rudd, despite being 49, charms his way through and through. His chemistry with his sparring partner Hope and grumpy mentor Hank warms the proceedings at all the right times and his friend, Michael Peña’s Luis rambling into flashbacks threatens to steal the film with its loony swerve.
The action sequences very aptly employ a flaky touch to choreograph the highs and lows of the plot. It’s so refreshing to see a Hello Kitty Pez dispenser or a salt shaker as lethal weapons, or an entire building being reduced to the size of box, to trolley it around. Reed keeps firing his goofy gun, sometimes reducing Ant-Man to a toddler’s size wading his way through a school, sometimes amped up to a giant size who uses a truck to pedal his way through. With Lily’s Wasp, Rudd’s Ant-Man sizes up the pantomime material with bounteous flourish.
Ant-Man and the Wasp does connect itself to Thanos’ wrath in the post-credit scene, but before that it trusts itself with the earnestness to tell a story that relies on familial charms. Thank Marvel for small mercies.
(The writer is a journalist, a screenwriter, and a content developer who believes in the insanity of words, in print or otherwise. He tweets @RanjibMazumder).
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