Ant-Man and the Wasp Review

Earlier this year the Marvel Cinematic Universe celebrating its 10th anniversary in mind-blowing fashion with the huge scope and success of "Avengers: Infinity War," which is still my favorite movie of the year. The movie broke the opening weekend record set by "Star Wars: The Force Awakens" in 2015 and is now the highest-grossing superhero movie ever worldwide as its just the fourth movie ever to cross the $2 billion mark after "Avatar," "Titanic" and "The Force Awakens," although it's going to fall just short of "Black Panther" domestically. Even though I absolutely love "Avengers: Infinity War," I acknowledge that the movie was very emotionally heavy, which is why I think "Ant-Man and the Wasp" was perfectly timed. It allows us to take a bit of a breather from that emotional weight and relax in the theaters as we figure out where Ant-Man and The Wasp were while the rest of the Avengers were battling Thanos. Did they just not get invited to the party or did they have other things going on during that they had to deal with? Even though "Ant-Man and the Wasp" was designed to be smaller scale in terms of the box office, the movie does bring its own milestone with it. This is the 20th movie in the Marvel Cinematic Universe. That's pretty crazy to think about.

I'm admittedly a bit late in getting this review out. I'm a huge fan of the MCU, like many others living on Earth, and thus I usually enjoy heading out opening weekend to see their latest film. This release, though, happened to land when I had family in town for the Independence Day weekend. For whatever reason, a trip to the movie theater wasn't on the schedule for us, so I waited for $5 Tuesday to see this. Then I didn't get around to writing my review earlier this week because I had to deal with Drake's album on my weekly Billboard Analysis segment over on my music blog. So you're getting this review a full week after the movie itself came. Because of that, I'm going to take a few liberties in discussing some plot details that I may have otherwise avoided if I had got this review out a week ago since most of you who were planning on seeing this have probably already done so. This won't be a full-out spoiler review, but if you were planning on seeing "Ant-Man and the Wasp," but just haven't gotten around to it and want everything regarding the plot to remain secret, then perhaps consider taking a rain check on reading this review. Just know that I really enjoyed the first "Ant-Man," and while this sequel doesn't quite hit those heights, it's still quite the blast.

Regarding that first movie, I remember that I had to participate in a lot of persuading while the market campaign was being rolled out. Everyone seemed to think the idea alone was really dumb and not a lot of said people were convinced otherwise when the trailers came out. I thought the trailers were quite genius, but outside that my big plug was that in Marvel we trust. Unlike the DCEU at the moment, the MCU has their formula down and they know how to please audiences. So why should we assume that a movie of theirs is going to be awful just because you don't like the premise? People seemed to forget that just a year before Marvel made a movie surrounding a talking tree and a raccoon into one of the most beloved Marvel movies. So can't we have more faith in Ant-Man, who happened to be one of the founding members of the Avengers in the comics? Luckily when the movie itself rolled around, I was proven right and audiences bought in. Despite the movie having the second lowest opening weekend of any MCU film, ahead of only "The Incredible Hulk," reviews were strong and word of mouth spread fast, leading it to what still stands as the second highest multiplier in the MCU as it wound up with $180 million domestically following a $57 million start.

The movie itself still stands as one of the funniest movies in the MCU for me as the level of creativity was so high with what they were able to do with shrinking element of the movie. Sadly Edgar Wright left the project during production due to creative differences with Marvel stemming from the fact that the movie had been in production since "Iron Man." Seven years later, Marvel had different ideas as far as where they wanted to take the movie as they were wrapping up phase II. But I still think the Edgar Wright influence with the final product was very strong as it still felt like an Edgar Wright superhero movie. If you've ever seen any of Edgar Wright's movies, you'll know exactly what I mean because he has a very distinct style that is extremely entertaining. I think that influence was able to push "Ant-Man" even higher in terms of style and humor than Peyton Reed, the director who took over for Edgar Wright, would've been able to do on his own. And that leads into "Ant-Man and the Wasp," which saw Peyton Reed in charge from day one as he was able to create his own movie rather than playing clean-up after the departure of Edgar Wright. And with this follow-up, I think he proved himself to be a very capable director.

"Ant-Man" was a very small-scale movie, which perhaps made it subtly brilliant given the nature of the premise. While other Marvel movies seemed to be obsessed with going bigger and better than the previous films, "Ant-Man" was content to take a step back and give us a localized heist film that you may have forgotten was even part of the MCU had it not been for a few references here and there to the Avengers, who Mr. Hank Pym was not a huge of. "Ant-Man and the Wasp" does remain smaller in scale than some of our recent MCU films, but at the same time it feels larger in scope that "Ant-Man" did. The premise starts off by following up on Scott Lang's perspective following the events of "Civil War." As a reminder about that, he was on Captain America's side of the feud, and unlike some of his teammates, it turns out he wasn't as good at the whole fugitive game. He got caught and has thus spent the past two years on house arrest. On top of that, Hank Pym is mad at him for stealing his suit and joining the Avengers in a silly escapade while it's mostly implied that his new girlfriend Hope Van Dyne is mad at him because he didn't invite her to come along. All of these combine to essentially give us the reasoning behind where he was during "Infinty War."

While it's true that the timeline is not 100 percent clear during the movie itself as to how close the events of "Ant-Man and the Wasp" overlap with "Infinity War," we do know that it takes place right before. There's further discussion to be had on on that subject, but that's all I'm willing to give away in this review. We can talk details later if you want. But the specific mission that our crew has in this movie is searching for Janet Van Dyne, Hank's wife and Hope's mother, who is stuck in the Quantum Realm and, as we learned in the last movie, may not be as dead as Hank originally thought, which leads to new scientific ideas of Quantum Realm stuff that Hank is eager to explore and learn about, depending on how this search for Janet goes. Also as we learned in the last movie, the final end credits scene to be exact, Hank has finally allowed his daughter Hope to use The Wasp suit, or a new one that he has built for her. Thus leading us to the movie's title of "Ant-Man and THE WASP." Despite Marvel having plenty of female superheroes and characters, Evangeline Lilly has the honor of being the first one of them to be in the title of her film, barely beating out next year's "Captain Marvel." Thus gives this movie another significant achievement in the history of the MCU.

The dynamic between Ant-Man and The Wasp is the strongest element of this movie. Despite not being on the best terms to start the movie off, Hank and Hope quickly learn that they need the help of Scott to find Janet because there's a possibility that she might be communicating with Scott after he went to the Quantum Realm and came back in the previous movie. So they set their differences aside and move forward with their mission. During the whole process, Hope proves that her dad should've trusted her with the suit a long time ago rather than finding Scott because she is a master with this Wasp suit. All the best action in the movie involves her kicking some villain trash as a complete boss, immediately making her one of the most likable characters in the MCU. Evangeline Lilly sells this so well and I'm super happy that she's achieved this huge break because I've been a huge fan of her's since she played Kate in "LOST." Yeah, she was invited to play Tauriel in those disastrous Hobbit movies and some might remember that she showed up in a movie called "Real Steel" before that, but this is her huge cinematic break as she's now headlining a Marvel film. Regardless of what you think of the rest of the movie, you're going to walk out loving The Wasp because she's awesome.

Personally I also loved the dynamic of this whole team. The Wasp is the leader, but Scott Lang as Ant-Man has the most progression as he's spent the first two movies, as well as his gig in "Civil War," figuring out how to be a superhero because that's previously never been his thing whereas Hope has spent her whole life training for battle, but being held back after what happened to her mother. So it makes perfect sense that she's the battle-trained hero in the movie whereas Scott is still stumbling around, trying to get a hold of things. It makes for a well balanced dynamic. On top of that we have Michael Pena's character of Luis playing the comedic relief while also getting a bit more to do in this movie regarding the action sequences and of course Michael Douglas owns the character of the old Dr. Hank Pym, the original Ant-Man and the one acting as the mentor for Scott and Hope while also being the one who is the expertise regarding the scientific element. When he's rambling off all of his science stuff, Michael Douglas does a great job making it all seem interesting. Added into the mix we also have Laurence Fishburne, a former colleague of Hank Pym who was best known for being Goliath, a fun tid-bit for comic book fans, before the two of them had a falling out.

In terms of story, searching for Janet Van Dyne feels like the natural progression for this particular franchise and there's so much fun to be had along the way with all the set pieces and the creative use of the shrinking and enlarging abilities. It's fun seeing them shrink their building they've been working in into a suitcase size thing and it's also fun to see the use of things like a Pez dispenser and a salt shaker as a weapon after enlarging them. If we're getting nit-picky with things, there's no moment in this movie that is quite as epic as the first movie's battle on the toy train set and the first movie also did a better job of having fun with the characters being super small. But there's still a lot of fun to be had with what they did come up with. The biggest negative of the movie, though, which seems like a broken record at this point with the MCU, comes with the villains. I want to make it perfectly clear, though, that I'm not talking about Ghost, who we see in the trailers. I loved her character, her backstory, her motivations and what she was able to do. Hannah John-Kamen, who is quietly having a great year, played her excellently. What I wasn't a fan of was the idea that this movie essentially had three villains and that felt like a bit too much. We could've stuck with Ghost.

The two other villains I'm talking about are Walton Goggins' character of Sonny Burch and Randall Park's FBI Agent Jimmy Woo. Walton Goggins had a lot of fun playing his character, but he was the mustache-twirling style of villain who really had no reasons for what he did. He just wanted to steal the technology that Hank and Hope had. And the story arc of the FBI chasing down Scott during this whole thing was funny at times. Randall Park had me laughing quite a bit. But as a whole it added a bit of extra fluff to the plot that didn't need to be there. The plot for "Ant-Man" was simple and concise as a fun heist movie. The plot for "Ant-Man and the Wasp" was a little too crowded and held the movie back from having even more fun that they already had. But overall this is another solid entry in the Marvel Cinematic Universe. It doesn't hit the heights of some of their recent movies, but it didn't need to. From day one this was supposed to be a fun, simple adventure to act as a place-holder while we wait for the Infinity War finale next year and it delivered on that. I don't know how it fits into my MCU rankings as a whole, but in terms of Phase III, it slides right in ahead of "Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2" and "Black Panther" while being behind the rest. My grade for it is an 8/10.