Review: Ant-Man and The Wasp is a fun Marvel film but feels like filler

Director: Peyton Reed

Writers: Paul Rudd, Gabriel Ferrari, Chris McKenna, and Andrew Barrer

Starring: Paul Rudd, Evangeline Lily, Michael Douglas, Lawerence Fishburne, and Hannah John-Kamen

Runtime: 1 hour and 58 minutes (118 minutes)

MPAA Rating: PG-13 (sci-fi action and violence)

Marvel has had a killer 2018 with Black Panther and Avengers: Infinity War, after having such a major success with the latter many knew it would be hard for Ant-Man and The Wasp to follow it up. While it doesn’t come close to either of 2018’s Marvel hits and it has some issues, it’s still a good time.

Ant-Man and The Wasp takes place two years after Captain America: Civil War and Ant-Man, AKA Scott Lang (Paul Rudd), is on house arrest after wreaking havoc at the airport in Germany. With his sentence just days away from being up, he gets a clue that could point to Hank Pym’s (Michael Douglas) wife and the original Wasp (Michelle Pfifer) still being alive inside the Quantum Realm.

With this new knowledge, Pym and his daughter Hope (Evangeline Lily) desperately try to build a device that can get them inside the Quantum Realm to pull their missing family member back to reality. With Pym and Hope being associates to Ant-Man, they’re on the run from the law and Scott is desperately trying to not be seen in public so he doesn’t get in trouble with the FBI.

Things quickly turn south when two different baddies show up to interfere with the band of heroes’ plans. A black market dealer known as Sonny Burch (Walton Goggins) is trying to take down the crew after they steal a valuable piece of equipment from him and a mysterious invisible entity known only as Ghost (Hannah John-Kamen) is after Pym’s tech and wife in order to cure herself of her powers which cause her to phase in and out of the physical realm.

With all of that said, it takes a lot of effort and ass-kicking to solve all of their issues and for the most part, it’s a fairly enjoyable ride. The jokes are consistently funny, it’s endlessly creative in its action and set-pieces, and it has a lot of heart. Ant-Man and The Wasp is a pretty solid refresher following the grim ending of Infinity War but for me, it lacked substance.

The film feels relatively inconsequential to the MCU as a whole outside of a post-credits scene, Ant-Man and The Wasp feels more like filler while we wait for Captain Marvel and Avengers 4 as if it’s some sort of appetizer. While I enjoyed watching it, I don’t really want to watch it again and it feels a tad hallow. The elements driving this sequel forward aren’t the story or even the characters, it’s that awesome action. Everything else just feels like ways to link to the next action scene.

The story isn’t bad but it’s not particularly good either. The story beats are predictable and you’ll find most of it to just do the bare minimum to be serviceable. There’s great chemistry between the three main characters is great and I loved watching their banter or devise clever plans, it helps build on this overall theme of family.

We find Scott at the start of the movie trying to mend his relationship with his daughter after being out of her life for so long and as the movie progresses, we see how much children value their parents and vice versa. Hope misses her mother dearly, Scott is trying to maintain this connection with his daughter even in these extraordinary circumstances, and Ghost feels almost empty after having her parents taken from her at an early age. It never fully reaches the heights that it maybe should have but it does enough to keep the film from falling flat thematically.

On the other hand, Ghost is a painfully bland villain who they try to make you care about but fail pretty hard at doing that. Her story is nothing more than a lab experiment gone wrong and while it feels like they write her in a way to get you to sympathize with her, I genuinely disliked watching her every time she was on-screen unless she was fighting someone. Ghost is visually a very cool character but she has no depth whatsoever and falls to the bottom of the already very long list of bad Marvel villains.

It’s disappointing to see this after Marvel has consistently given us awesome villains in the last year like Michael Keaton’s Vulture in Spider-Man, Michael B Jordan’s Killmonger in Black Panther, or Josh Brolin’s Thanos in Infinity War. Hopefully, this is just an anomaly and Marvel stays on track with Captain Marvel otherwise there may be reason to worry that they just got lucky these last few times and haven’t learned from past mistakes.

Where the movie feels triumphant is in its stellar action scenes. Peyton Reed knows how to craft exhilarating and incredibly creative set-pieces but we already knew that after seeing the toy room finale in the first film. In Ant-Man and The Wasp, he takes it up a notch by throwing in cars and buildings that can grow and shrink, having a character that can phase through matter, and much more.

There are multiple moments throughout the movie, sometimes within the same scenes, where Reed executes something that makes great use of everyone’s powers in unique and exciting ways. It’s enough to make your eyes go wide and marvel at a cool stunt like Wasp taking down a car filled with bad guys one by one inside the car.

One final issue that stuck out to me with the movie was that the CG felt inconsistent. Sometimes it was incredible, sometimes it was very noticeable what was real or fake. It’s usually when characters of varying sizes are interacting with each other and Ghost had a few moments where she looked a bit uncanny. It happened enough for me to point it out but it’s not like it’s something that can be seen in every shot, it just seemed to depend on a bunch of different variables.

The Verdict

Even with a weak villain, inconsistent CG, and a somewhat cookie cutter plot, Ant-Man and The Wasp does just enough to save itself from being totally forgettable. While this will likely end up ranking fairly low on most MCU rankings, it’s a good time at the movie theater and almost every actor gives it their all. The jokes land consistently, Rudd and Lily have electric chemistry, and the film has no shortage of originality when it comes to the engaging chases and battles.