BEFORE: I'm sneaking out to the movies tonight (August 15), though I'm smack in the middle of my Summer Music Documentary chain, so I won't be able to post this review right away, I'll have to sit on it for a couple of weeks. But if I've planned everything right, and everything goes according to plan, then the last film in that chain was narrated by Paul Rudd, and I would have watched that just a couple of days ago. Only for me now, that film is still a few weeks in the future, but I have confidence that I'll get there. So ideally Paul Rudd carries over from "A Futile and Stupid Gesture", and this will make three appearances in a row for him. (EDIT: Yeah, the plan changed. Now Paul Rudd carries over from "The Fundamentals of Caring", and it's four Rudds in a row.)
AFTER: It's hard to say that this one picks up right where "Ant-Man" left off, because it really doesn't, although in some ways it does. It does and it doesn't. Since that film, Ant-Man was part of the Avengers team seen in "Captain America: Civil War", although he was on the Captain America side of the war, which technically lost. So that explains why both Hawkeye and Ant-Man weren't seen in "Avengers: Infinity War", because they were serving time for their actions. For Ant-Man, that meant two years of house arrest, and his accomplices, Hope Van Dyne and Henry Pym, are living on the run. I had hoped that the events of "Infinity War" would bring both Ant-Man and the Wasp to the Avengers line-up, but that's not going to happen here, because this film takes place concurrently with the events of the latest Avengers film.
Instead, the task at hand is to follow-up on a different thread from "Ant-Man", the one where he shrunk down to the quantum realm and then somehow came back, which was thought to be impossible. But since the first Wasp, Janet Van Dyne, got stuck in that realm 30 years before, that could mean that she somehow survived there, and can be brought back. After a lot of science-y explanation stuff, Pym thinks he's found a way to do that, only he needs whatever information is inside Scott's head. This brings the team back together in a awkwardly fulfilling kind of way, plus they have to battle a bunch of gangsters who want their technology, and also a mysterious phasing villain called The Ghost.
The Ghost is one of Iron Man's villains in the comic books, but it makes sense to carry him over to another tech-heavy corner of the Marvel Universe, and also to make him into a her. Equality extends even to super-villains, too. So why not put a new spin on a minor villain character? I think there's a limit to this sort of process, though - like how that latest "Fantastic Four" movie when just a bit too far, by making Dr. Doom into a teenage hacker and the Human Torch into a black guy. Yeah, I get that racial equality is important, but that narrative really had to bend over backwards to explain how a brother and sister were of different racial descent.
They're really getting good at using that technology to overlap the young-looking faces of older actors on to younger people's bodies. They used this is "Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2" to create a young-looking Kurt Russell, and in "Rogue One" to create the younger Princess Leia and the stand-in for Peter Cushing. Here they use the effect three times, to create young versions of Michael Douglas, Michelle Pfeiffer and Laurence Fishburne in the flashbacks. Fortunately they probably had plenty of reference material by looking at their films from the 1980's. They used Fishburne's son as the stand-in model to overlay his father's face on, and I think that one probably worked the best. I could still tell there was something not 100% right about it, though.
NITPICK POINT: The interaction between the Federal agents and Scott Lang is played for comedy here, but it wears thin after a while. There's only so many times you can repeat the same joke, with Scott being alerted to the fact that the agents are heading to his house, and him arriving there ahead of them, with just enough time to change into a bathrobe and make himself look busy doing something. Twice is fine, but it feels like this film repeated that joke half a dozen times. Tangential to this is the fact that they never really explained HOW they got the ankle bracelet off of him and on to his stand-in - I suppose we can assume that Hope made the ankle bracelet bigger, slipped it off of him, put it on his dupe and then shrunk it again, but why not point that out?
NITPICK POINT #2: Since Lang only had three days left of house arrest, why not wait three days before contacting his associates? And for the other characters, why not let him serve out the last three days before abducting him and taking him off on an adventure? It would have been so easy to follow the rules here, thus avoiding the conflict between being a superhero and breaking the law. Of course, time was of the essence with regards to accessing the quantum realm, but they didn't KNOW that at the time. Waiting another three days to get together wouldn't have made a difference, at least at that point in the story.
NITPICK POINT #3: The chase sequence with the different sports cars and the van is very exciting, and rather well put-together, and of course it relies heavily on the ability to make the vehicles, as well as other objects, smaller and bigger. That's the film's go-to effect, so naturally it would manifest itself over and over during any fight or chase sequence. But there's a big difference between making one random thing smaller or bigger, and making a vehicle with people in it smaller or bigger. Most of the time with a single object, they show how a disc is launched, attaches itself to an object, then that object grows or shrinks as desired. But since a car or van has living people in it, if you just shrunk the car, you would crush the people inside of it and/or destroy the car in the process. So obviously a different form of the growth change was needed for this, like they had to generate an entire shrinking field within the car, so that the passengers would shrink at the same time and rate as the car.
This leads to other problems, like when they shrink down the lab building, everything within the building gets shrunk down as well, including all of their equipment, including the tunnel to the quantum realm. What happens when something that's used for shrinking other things is inside a whole building that gets shrunk? What would happen if someone used the quantum tunnel within the building, then the building got shrunk, then that person tried to come BACK from the quantum realm? Would he then come back from teeny-tiny to just tiny? Or would he come back to full-size and be enlarged too much within the tiny building? They sort of danced around this problem in the film, but never really discussed it outright.
Also starring Evangeline Lilly (last seen in "Ant-Man"), Michael Douglas (ditto), Michelle Pfeiffer (last seen in "Murder on the Orient Express"), Laurence Fishburne (last seen in "Passengers"), Michael Peña (last seen in "Collateral Beauty"), Walton Goggins (last seen in "The Hateful Eight"), Bobby Cannavale (also carrying over from "The Fundamentals of Caring"), Judy Greer (last seen in "War for the Planet of the Apes"), Tip "T.I." Harris (last seen in "Popstar: Never Stop Never Stopping"), David Dastmalchian (last seen in "Blade Runner 2049"), Hannah John-Kamen (last seen in "Ready Player One"), Randall Park (last seen in "The House"), Abby Ryder Fortson (also last seen in "Ant-Man"), Michael Cerveris (last seen in "The Mexican"), Riann Steele, Hayley Lovitt, Dax Griffin, Langston Fishburne, with cameos from Brian Huskey (last seen in "Neighbors 2: Sorority Rising"), Tim Heidecker (last seen in "Tim and Eric's Billion Dollar Movie"), Stan Lee (last seen in "If You're Not in the Obit, Eat Breakfast").
RATING: 7 out of 10 water bears
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