Ant-Man & The Wasp

(PG) ★★★

Director: Peyton Reed.

Cast: Paul Rudd, Evangeline Lilly, Michael Douglas, Michael Peña, Laurence Fishburne, Hannah John-Kamen, Walton Goggins, Randall Park, Michelle Pfeiffer.

"Uh-oh, it's Edgar Wright. Awkward."

Read my Ant-Man review here.

Read the Marvel Cinematic Universe - From Best To Worst here.

Oh how we laughed when they said they were making an Ant-Man movie. How could that ever work? But Marvel found a way, and lo, it was good. And funny as all get-out too.

And after Avengers: Infinity War tore the MCU a new one, we need funny. Thankfully Ant-Man & The Wasp is funny. It's also got some nice action sequences, but it's severely lacking in some other areas.

When we last saw Ant-Man AKA Scott Lang (Rudd) in he was locked up for fighting with Cap in the battle for superhero freedom otherwise known as Captain America: Civil War. Two years on, he's under house arrest and has fallen out with the original Ant-Man Hank Pym (Douglas) and Hank's daughter Hope (Lilly) AKA The Wasp.

But Hank's attempts to find his wife Janet (Pfeiffer) AKA the original Wasp have awakened something locked in Scott's mind from when he shrank too small and entered the sub-atomic quantum realm (as seen in the first film). That's where Janet went missing, which means Scott is about to be drawn back into danger to help with the search.

"Quantum" is a pretty important word in Ant-Man & The Wasp and it's one that gets bandied about way too much. It's used to paper over plotholes and find ways to connect the disparate story threads together. "Why is this happening?" "Because it's quantum" is a pretty common conversation explainer throughout this film.

It makes for some frustrating and boring stretches of scientific technobabble, equipment tweaking, frequency dialling, and experiment fine-tuning that never believably intertwine the three main plots. These plots are the search for Janet, the plight of a character called Ghost (John-Kamen), and the machinations of evil black market tech tycoon Sonny Burch (Goggins), and they sit together awkwardly. This means the characters of Ghost and Bill Foster (Laurence Fishburne) are underdone, while Burch is little more than an annoyance. On top of this is the distinct feeling this is a two-and-a-half-hour film trimmed to two hours in the editing suite, but which could have been made into a 100-minute film in the screenplay.

But when things are working, it's something to behold. The comedy is solid and well-placed, some of the action sequences are great fun, and the final act goes a long way towards redeeming the film. When it's playing around with the possibilities of having a bad guy that can phase through things and two good guys who can instantly shrink or grow, it's a superhero spectacle worthy of the Marvel banner. Its deep dive into the quantum realm is also visually intriguing.

There is also a good amount of heart here, although it's somewhat diluted by the wonky scripting. The connection between parent and child is a key theme, but it's not as strong as you'd expect. Again, when it works it's great, and it's reaching for some emotional depth that's not as prevalent in the MCU as you would like. Some of the subject matter in Ant-Man & The Wasp had the potential to move us to tears, but it never gets there.

Rudd is again a delight as Scott Lang, while Lilly's Hope kicks arse more than last time. Douglas, Fishburne, and Pfeiffer add some gravitas to the more ridiculous elements. In fact, the cast has no weak links (Peña is again a scene-stealer) - it's only that some of them are let down by the script (Ghost and Burch are the notable one-note characters).

Ant-Man & The Wasp is by no means bad. It's just not up to the lofty standards of the best of the MCU. It's funny and fun but a little too wrapped up and tripped up by its quantum entanglement of plots to be truly great.