Ant-Man and the Wasp

2018 sequel

Rating: 14/20

Plot: Ant-Man is trying to balance life as a criminal under house arrest and a father when he's forced to Ant-Man himself again to help out some former associates. Meanwhile, a glitchy girl and some other bad people try to get in the way.

Tim Heidecker has a cameo in this movie, and the Ant-Man connection with his lampooning On Cinema at the Cinema movie review show with Gregg Turkington is currently my favorite thing. Turkington had a bit role in the first Ant-Man movie, a source of jealousy for Heidecker's On Cinema character named Tim Heidecker. This time, Heidecker is Whale Boat Captain Daniel Gooobler although I'm not sure about the three O's in that surname. That's what it has on IMdB though. Anyway, the back and forth on Twitter with Heidecker and Turkington might actually be better than this movie

But the movie is a nice harmless shot of summer adrenaline without being an extension of the On Cinema cinematic universe. With Black Panther, a movie that managed to be about some very serious things, and Infinity War, Marvel in 2018 was bombastic and maybe a little depressing, Marvel probably needed something that was just fun.  By the time the credits have finished rolling, this does place itself in the overall Marvel timeline, but this is mostly just spirited adventure, confusing superhero hijinks, sketchy science fiction, and daffy humor.

I think I even laughed twice!

I've never thought Angeline Lilly has much charisma, but she works really well with Paul Rudd, who, out of all the actors working in Hollywood these days, is the most like Paul Rudd. Michael Pena steals nearly every scene he's in, and Michael Douglas, though very old, seems to be having a lot of fun being in a Marvel superhero movie. And if you close your eyes and think about what kind of slimeball Walton Goggins would be really good at playing, that's pretty much exactly what you'll get here. Michelle Pfeiffer, returning to the superhero genre, and Laurence Fishburne, returning to the movie-that-is-almost-entirely-special-effects genre round out a pretty impressive cast. Oh, and Hannah John-Kamen plays the glitchy girl, but she mostly lets the cool costume and the special effects do their thing. The five people who wrote this, including Ant-Man himself, have a great balance of humor and dramatic action here, and the two really mingle together well.

The special effects are also fun, the movie being one of those cases where the storyboarders are obviously having a good time making sure audiences will have a good time with these concepts. Lilly's Wasp does most of the heavy lifting in the action scenes for reasons I won't spoil, but both characters get some invigorating action sequences that never really got boring. There are scenes with superhuman characters kicking and punching each other like in every Marvel movie, but the particular powers of these characters made for some original fight sequences. The same goes with a lengthy action sequence involving a lot of cars. Ant-Man and the Wasp is well-paced fun.

You wouldn't want to watch this with a curmudgeonly scientist, I wouldn't think, because I'm fairly positive the scientific stuff is flawed. It's less sci-fi than it is fantasy-fi, but if you're not willing to suspend your disbelief with these superhero movies, I'm not sure what you're doing watching them anyway. There's all this stuff about the Quantum Realm which didn't make a ton of sense to me, but by the time certain characters get there, it's breathtakingly psychedelic. Lava lamp goops, strange creatures, all sorts of shapes that resembled the stuff I used to see under microscopes as a kid. That visit was a lot of nonsensical fun. And so was this movie.

This fits into the bigger picture with these Marvel movies, but I have kind of stopped caring about that.

What I care more about is the upcoming WhaleMan featuring Tim Heidecker. Look for that one in 2020.