Review of Ant-Man and the Wasp (2018) by Maxx D — 01 Aug 2018

This film marks both a major improvement and a decline from the last film. The characters are as fun and charming as ever, including some new ones. The childishly friendly FBI agent in over his head was a particular highlight.

Walton Goggins' illicit tech dealer was less interesting (the backwoods Southern and rugged Goggins is either horribly miscast or improperly utilized as a pseudocultured effete) and the return of Luis and his friends feels more a studio-mandated cameo than essential plot framework.

The shrink tech and visual gags are easily the biggest improvement from the first film. They really go all out here and it gets WEIRD. The action scenes are fittingly insane and feature numerous shrinking car chases.

The only tech that doesn't work is, curiously, the new randomly phasing villain. There are a large number of ways they could incorporate her random shiftings into an action scene but mainly she just punches people while the digital effects add a few ghosts of her doing so.

This seems a curious failure of imagination. The other part of the reason why she doesn't work is the performance. There's no threat to her whatsoever, only a desperation close to panic. She's barely even a villain, leaving us with underdeveloped plot motivations to account for her adversarial nature.

The plot in general is pretty slapdash. It's mainly about rescuing Janet from the quantum realm, but the progression to get us there is not awfully clear and has some pretty arbitrary obstacles on the way.

There are a large number of scenes where you can just feel the gears switching over from character fluff (mostly good) to exposition (mostly clunky) or from action to comedy. It's got a lot of good stuff in there, but it doesn't really cohere like it should.