Earlier this year, Marvel achieved its biggest box office success yet with Avengers: Infinity War. It was a surprisingly great superhero film, deeply ambitious and subverting audience expectations with a darker ending than anyone had anticipated. It also managed to balance a shocking amount of characters pretty effectively. But superhero Ant-Man (Paul Rudd) was missing from that film, and now we know why with Ant-Man and the Wasp, the twentieth film in the Marvel Cinematic Universe.

Following on from the events of Captain America: Civil War, Ant-Man has been placed under house arrest after taking part in an Avengers battle alongside war criminal Captain America (Chris Evans). But after he has a strange vision, he decides to help former flame Hope (Evangeline Lilly) find her mother (Michelle Pfeiffer), long lost after shrinking so much that she went subatomic. But in their way is a new villain known as The Ghost (Hannah John-Kamen), whose molecular structure is unstable, allowing her to phase through objects.

Director Peyton Reed’s original Ant-Man (2015) was a charming, fun, albeit forgettable superhero entry. The film worked mostly thanks to the charisma of its cast, particularly Rudd and Lilly. The same can be said about this sequel, also directed by Reed. There are some improvements here over the original: Reed has delivered a much more confident entry, and the cinematography by Dante Spinotti is a big improvement over the original’s, which looked bland and forgettable. There’s also more creativity with the action sequences, fully embracing the shrinking/growing abilities of our heroes. A particularly funny sequence finds Ant-Man stuck in between normal and ant-size at his daughter’s school.

But the real highlight of the film is the cast. Paul Rudd steals the show, his charisma and charm on full display. He’s clearly having a lot of fun with the role. Evangeline Lilly is also great, with a much more active role than she had in the original. She approaches the role just right, giving it the right amount of seriousness to sell it, but she clearly also knows that she’s in a comic book film and is having fun with it, too. Also worthy of high praise is the scene-stealing Michael Peña, whose comic timing provides many of the film’s laughs.

All that being said, the film has one major weakness: it has followed Avengers: Infinity War, the film that combined Marvel’s trademark humour with darker elements so effectively, and had actual emotional weight, a surprisingly interesting villain, and an ending that is still fresh in the minds of all who saw it. This film, despite being fun and entertaining, can’t help but fall under the shadow cast by Infinity War. To see the Marvel formula shaken up in that film, and to then witness the return of the formula here in Ant-Man, is a little disheartening. The closest we get is a mid-credit scene which effectively ties in with the events of Infinity War and elicited a bigger reaction from me than anything in the film.

Ant-Man and the Wasp is a fun, entertaining superhero film. It features a lot of laughs, some fun action sequences, and benefits from its very talented cast, particularly leads Paul Rudd and Evangeline Lilly. Nevertheless, the film can’t help but fall under the shadow of the previous entry in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, which effectively shook up the formula and gave us something new. If you’re a Marvel fan, you’ll undoubtedly enjoy the film and find it worth the price of admission.

(And make sure you stay for that mid-credit scene! As far as these Marvel credits teasers go, this is one of the best!)







Author Details Seán Flynn Contributor Seán Flynn is in his early twenties and lives in a small town in Ireland. His ultimate passion is film, and he spends a great deal of his time getting trains to Dublin City to see obscure indie movies. He works at a cinema, and also enjoys reading. Favourite authors include J.R.R. Tolkien, Stephen King, J.K. Rowling, and George R.R. Martin. He has written reviews for ‘Grand Central Magazine’.