4 / 10
Official trailer
Ant-Man and the Wasp is competent in every department and consequential in none. It arrived ten weeks after Avengers: Infinity War with a plot about retrieving a car from a black-market dealer, and it never locates a reason for the audience to care whether anyone succeeds.
The performances are fine. The effects are fine. The jokes land at roughly the rate the previous film’s did. What’s missing is pressure, and no amount of craft substitutes for a story where nothing is at risk.
I don’t rewatch it, and the one piece of it I remember is thirty seconds long and plays after the credits.
The trouble with this one is how agreeable it is.
Everybody on screen seems to be having a nice time, and the film asks me to have one too, ten weeks after Infinity War. I wanted the story to find something worth fighting for. It found a stolen lab, a car, and a black-market dealer, and none of it ever mattered to me.
What is at stake in Ant-Man and the Wasp?
Nothing that the film treats as urgent. Janet van Dyne has been in the Quantum Realm for thirty years and is established as alive and stable, so the rescue works on no clock. Ghost is deteriorating, the closest thing to a deadline, and the film keeps interrupting her plot to run a comedy subplot about a stolen lab. Sonny Burch wants to sell technology and is never a physical threat to anyone.
Compare the first film, where Darren Cross was preparing to sell a weaponized shrinking suit to buyers who would use it, and Scott Lang’s daughter was in the room during the climax. That film was also modest, and it had a floor beneath it. This one has three antagonists sharing a plot and not one of them ever forces the protagonists to give anything up.
The house arrest device gets credited as tension and never works as tension. Lang is three days from release, the film stages the FBI check-ins for comedy, and the script writes Jimmy Woo as an amiable obstacle.
Nothing in the film suggests he’s ever going to lose his daughter. When a constraint carries no credible consequence, repeating it only builds a runner. I’d have let the house arrest bite once, one check-in he truly blows, and every gag after it would have carried some weight.
For Writers
Three antagonists with unrelated objectives will always produce less tension than one antagonist with a clear objective, because tension concentrates, and splitting it three ways spends it. Ghost needs a cure, Sonny Burch needs a payday, and the FBI needs a signature, and each one interrupts the other two. The audience never gets to sit inside a single escalating problem long enough to feel it tighten.
This is the most common structural failure in second acts, and it usually comes from the same instinct: the writer worries the middle is thin and adds a complication instead of deepening the one already present. The fix is subtraction. Ask which antagonist the story is about, give that one the running time the other two were consuming, and let the pressure accumulate. A thin middle is almost never solved by more plot.
Ghost Is the Film That Should Have Been Made
Ava Starr phases through matter involuntarily, is in constant pain, and is dying from the condition. Hannah John-Kamen plays her with a desperation the surrounding film has no idea how to accommodate. Laurence Fishburne’s Bill Foster supplies the argument that Hank Pym’s negligence created her, and that argument implicates a character the audience has spent a film and a half liking.
That’s a real story. A man’s carelessness produced a person who suffers continuously, and she’s come to collect.
The film raises it and then declines to let it cost Pym anything. Michael Douglas plays no meaningful guilt. The resolution arrives as a technical fix, everyone is broadly fine, and the moral weight the setup generated is discharged without being paid.
Ghost also spends the second half sharing screen time with a black-market dealer whose entire function is to trigger car chases. The trade is indefensible. Remove Sonny Burch and there’s room to make the antagonist’s claim land.
Ghost is the part of this movie I’d fight for. John-Kamen plays pain like a job she can’t clock out of, and Fishburne gives the case against Pym real authority.
Then the film hands her a technical fix and lets Pym walk off clean, and that lost me. I wanted Douglas made to face what his character did, and the script sends everybody off to chase Sonny Burch.
The Rescue With No Jeopardy
Michelle Pfeiffer is on screen for a few minutes and is good in them. The problem is everything before. The film has established Janet van Dyne as findable, reachable, and intact, so the retrieval is a logistics exercise. The script generates its obstacles from equipment being stolen instead of from the rescue being difficult. That means a subplot about who currently possesses a building repeatedly displaces the emotional core of the plot.
The Quantum Realm sequences are visually committed and narratively empty. Pym goes in, finds his wife roughly where expected, and comes back. Thirty years of loss resolves in a scene without a complication, and Douglas plays the reunion well enough that you notice the writing hasn’t earned it.
The reunion is the weakest part of the film. Pfeiffer and Douglas are good enough to sell thirty years of separation in a glance, and the script gives them nothing to push against on the way there. I’d have cut half the squabbling over the lab and spent that time in the Quantum Realm, where something could have gone wrong.
Evangeline Lilly gets better action design than in the first film and no interior life to go with it. Hope’s grievance with her father evaporates the moment the plot requires them to cooperate, and her reunion with her mother is staged as a beat instead of as the thing she’s wanted her whole life.
Craft: A Delivery Mechanism for a Plot Device
Craft Note
The most consequential thirty seconds in this film happen after it ends. Lang enters the Quantum Realm, the three people operating the equipment turn to dust, and he’s stranded. That moment gives Avengers: Endgame (2019) its time-travel mechanism, and it’s the reason the film exists in the release schedule. Everything preceding it’s a two-hour runway for one plot device.
There’s a lesson in that about franchise construction. When an entry’s function is to position a piece for a later film, the writing has to work twice as hard to give the entry its own reason to exist, because the audience can feel the difference between a story and a placement. This one doesn’t do that work. It substitutes charm for stakes and assumes goodwill will carry the difference, and for a lot of viewers in 2018 it did.
The 4 reflects a film I have no reason to return to. It’s not badly made. The size-shifting gags are inventive, Michael Peña’s second narration sequence is funny, and the San Francisco chase is legible and well staged. None of it accumulates. Ant-Man (2015, rated 6) is a better film because Darren Cross was going to sell the suit and Scott Lang’s daughter was in the house. That’s a low bar and this film goes under it.
Should you skip Ant-Man and the Wasp?
A 4. Ant-Man and the Wasp is pleasant, well made, and inert. The rescue plot has no clock because the film establishes Janet van Dyne as safe. Ghost is a strong antagonist whose moral claim against Hank Pym the film raises and never charges to him. Sonny Burch consumes the screen time that claim needed.
The film stages the house arrest device for comedy throughout, and it never carries a credible consequence, so repeating it produces a runner instead of escalation. Evangeline Lilly gets better choreography and less character than in the first film.
The film grossed approximately six hundred twenty-three million dollars worldwide, outperforming the original commercially. It also contributed one thing of lasting value to the franchise, and that thing plays after the credits. Watch the post-credits scene before Endgame. The two hours in front of it are optional.
I’m more annoyed by this film than I’d be by a bad one, because everybody involved clearly knew how to make a good one. The post-credits scene shouldn’t be the best reason to press play, and on this film it is. Peña’s narration and the size gags aren’t enough to pull me back through two hours where nobody is ever in danger, and that’s why it scores so low for something this well made.
