Ant-Man and the Wasp

Marvel films have enjoyed an unprecedented run at the box office--nineteen movies, nineteen his. Ant-Man and the Wasp, the twentieth film in the series, was also a hit, and got some good reviews. But I found it lacking, and close to the bottom of the list, perhaps only slightly better than Iron Man 2.

The first Ant-Man was pretty good, but this one suffers from a bad script, credited to five writers, including star Paul Rudd. The film attempts to be comic, but most of the humor falls flat, and they've made Rudd's character Scott Lang a complete dope.

Picking up from the end of Captain America: Civil War, Rudd is in house arrest for participating in the superhero brawl in Germany. He's very serious about obeying the law, because he doesn't want to go back to prison. Hank Pym (Michael Douglas) and his daughter Hope (Evangeline Lilly) are fugitives from the law. They hate Rudd for exposing Douglas' technology to the world.

Things change when Rudd has a dream and finds himself psychically intertwined with Douglas' wife (Michelle Pfeiffer) who shrunk so small she went to the "quantum realm" and couldn't come back. Douglas has been working on technology that could take him to her, and Rudd is the link.

Meanwhile, two adversaries want that technology (amusingly, Douglas can shrink his lab to suitcase size, but wouldn't all the furniture get knocked around?)--a woman called Ghost (Hannah John-Kamen), who wears what looks like a white hazmat suit and can pass through solid walls, and a sleazy dealer in black market technology (Walton Goggins).

So Rudd and Lilly, who is the Wasp of the title, fight off their foes so Pfeiffer can be found (a few unanswered questions--what did she eat? How did she go to the bathroom?) Some of the action scenes are quite good, especially when Lilly kicks ass, and a couple of car chases (in one, Rudd increases in size and uses a flat bed truck like a scooter).

But overall, the film is too silly and insubstantial to be enjoyed. In addition to making Rudd completely stupid, Douglas overacts mercilessly. There's lots of phony scientific jargon--"maybe the vectors are off!" "We checked them a million times!" that are one of the weaker parts of comic books, and the film has trouble balancing the comedic aspects with the more serious overtones (Ghost is dying, and needs the technology to live).

The film tries very hard to be funny, subjecting a good actor, Michael Pena, to serve as the buffoon. There is a bit in which he and some thugs argue whether there's such a thing as truth serum, which goes nowhere. So does a scene in which Rudd is tied up and held prisoner but gets a cell phone call from his daughter.

Occasionally the film hits a right note, such as including a clip from the film Them! (the greatest giant ant film of all time), or when Lilly, during a car chase, enlarges a Hello Kitty Pez dispenser. I also liked when a character shrinks down so small that tardigrades, an amazing animal, seem like the size of elephants. These moments are too few and far between.