Wasp (Not Wasp)

Ant-Man and the Wasp (2018) is a nice follow up to the original. The first was bright and fun and uncomplicated. This one is a bit busier, but still fun.

It starts with Ant-Man, Paul Rudd exploring a microscopic world with his daughter, Abby Ryder Fortson - except it turns out to be an elaborate cardboard fort. Rudd is under house arrest, and having trouble keeping his little girl entertained. When he sticks one foot outside the fence, the Feds, led by Randall Park, come down on him. They are sure that he is a super-criminal, because of the events at the airport in that Avengers movie.

Meanwhile, Hank Pym (Michael Douglas) is searching for his wife, Janet van Dyne, the original Wasp, who has been lost in the Quantum Realm. He had given up rescuing her, but since Rudd came back, he is encouraged. While he is trying to open a portal, Rudd has a dream about van Dyne in the realm, and wakes up when Douglas calls him. He is clearly quantum entangled with her.

Pym’s daughter Evangeline Lilly goes to the black market to get some special parts, and sleazy dealer Walton Goggins tries to take the money and not deliver. This leads to a nice fight, but new character enter: a white costumed woman (Hannah John-Kamen) who phases in and out of existence. And she gets away with the goods, a full physics lab shrunk to the size of a suitcase.

So Douglas recruits Rudd, leaving a human-sized ant with the ankle monitor, to provide the proper day-to-day activity. Rudd just wants to serve out his sentence (he has two weeks left, I think), but gets whisked away and stuffed into a glitchy experimental suit. This makes for some fun fights, where Rudd can’t exactly control his size.

The fights are in general, a lot of fun. Our size-shifters shrink to avoid blows and grow to giant size to return them, beautifully choreographed. Add in a character who can phase in and out of existence, and you’ve got a movie.

Michael Pena is back as Rudd’s reformed criminal friend. He has a few good scenes, but not quite as many as the last time. He gets dosed with a mix of drugs that make you talkative and suggestible, but, the bad guys insist, is not a truth serum. So of course, he just starts free associating. Rudd has a similar scene, where his phone keeps ringing during a tense interrogation (by Laurence Fishburne) and he insists on taking it, because it’s his daughter, who lost her soccer shoes.

I’ll skip spoilers, but we do eventually get Jan van Dyne back, and she turns out to be played by Michelle Pfeiffer. She is iconic, of course, but had a kind of bad-ass Earth Mother style. My Janet van Dyne is a fashion-obsessed madcap heiress, which doesn’t really fit. Well, she said she changed a lot during her time in the realm.

And it all ends happily - until we get to the tie-in with the rest of the Marvel-verse. But that’s a story for another time.