Jean-Paul’s rating: 4/5 stars
Bottom Line: Fun and funny. Creatively choreographed growing/shrinking sequences. Yay, a female superhero who gets title billing! And another good and believable villain!
Ant-Man (Paul Rudd) is back and once again he is a delightful comedic escape from the more serious Marvel universe. This time he’s paired with the Wasp (Evangeline Lilly (I love that first name)), Hank Pym’s (Michael Douglas) daughter. After a brief interlude in which it is explained how Wasp/Hope van Dyne became the Wasp, since it was not alluded to at all in the first movie and basically is “your mother is lost in the quantum realm and we can save her and oh, here’s her suit”, we see Scott Lang/Ant-Man under house arrest after his antics in “Avengers: Civil War”. Unlike the first “Ant-Man” movie, this time establishment scene and the mid-credit teaser are all that we really see into the larger Marvel universe. This is a good thing. It lets Ant-Man be Ant-Man.
Once again, we are treated to a compelling villain! If Marvel keeps this up, I may start believing they’re getting good at it. This time it’s Ghost/Ava (Hannah John-Kamen) who is trying to create the quantum tunnel that Hope and Hank are also trying to accomplish, but by more villainous means. Everything she does makes sense. It’s refreshing. Not only that, but this movie is, I believe only the second film where a female superhero gets movie title billing. Only other one being “Electra”. Given, it’s shared title billing, but the dam is starting to break. Next up is “Captain Marvel” which is also about a female superhero! Yay!
Unlike the first “Ant-Man” movie, this one also features some wonderfully choreographed action sequences. The use of both Wasp’s and Ant-Man’s shrinking abilities is used to great effect and we are treated to Wasp running down the blade of a knife that is thrown at her and using a quickly enlarged salt shaker to prevent a bad guy’s escape. I guess most of it was actually Wasp. Ant-Man was in this movie too, I swear. More for comedy relief, I guess.
Hey, I just realized that I liked the sequel better than the original. That doesn’t happen very often. “Ant-Man and the Wasp” is definitely a worth watching movie and its comedy give it great replay value too. It’s not necessarily a need to see it in the movie theater type of movie, but you’ll be happy if you watch it now instead of waiting for, what is it these days, three months?