Ant-Man and the Wasp
There’s an episode of the old-time radio show Dimension X called The Professor was a Thief where a mad professor shrinks the Empire State Building, Grant’s Tomb, a railroad and other landmarks to suitcase size. It was written by L. Ron Hubbard, but back when he was just a pulp sci-fi author and before he turned that crap into a cult. It’s a pretty good episode, amusing, told from the point of view of beleaguered and skeptical reporters.
I mention this because the episode is 30-minutes long, deals with a mad man, alternate dimensions and the ability to compact space and and time. Ant-Man and the Wasp does the same thing over two overly-complicated hours. That left me a shitload more time to think about whether or not I am being entertained.
Paul Rudd plays Ant-Man, a mild-mannered father with a special suit that lets him shrink to ant size, or smaller, or grow to the size of a passenger ferry. When small, he rides around on flying ants. Evangeline Lily is the Wasp, a former paramour who also shrinks, has laser blasters and her own wings. Her father (Michael Douglas) is the mastermind behind all the suits and techno gadgets. He’s a genius in quantum physics, but one who sports a goatee the way an 80-year-old who wants to fuck strippers does.
Speaking of quantum, Pops and his daughter seek to reach some Marvel Comics Neverland called the Quantum Realm, a place too infinitesimally small--or some such shit--for most people in our dimension to go. They think his wife and her mom got stuck there.
Ant-Man went there once and survived, so maybe he can help them find Mom. This is the main quest of this movie. Only, they don’t want to send Ant-Man, Pops wants to go. They just need... memories or something from Ant-Man? I’m not sure, the movie loading up on complications like it was half-price Easter candy at K-Mart.
Pops and the Wasp will kill many people, crash many cars and do immeasurable damage to infrastructure for the very flimsy reason of seeing Mom again. The fate of the world doesn’t rest of Mom’s survival. She doesn’t even have a good triple-berry pie recipe. She’s just Mom and they’re just nostalgic. The stakes couldn’t be lower.
That’s why the complications. Those include a dumbass subplot about Ant-Man’s fledgling security business trying to win a big contract, a corrupt arms dealer (Walter Groggins, sporting a forehead you could build a Bass Pro on) wanting to steal the old man’s tech, a bitter rival professor (Laurence Fishburne) of the old man, and a new villain/misunderstood woman named Ghost (Hannah John-Kamen) who is stuck between dimensions and acts like she’s in a lot of pain. I haven’t even gotten to the comic relief, which is as corny as the shit in the porta-potties in Mitchell, South Dakota. An FBI agent trying to keep Ant-Man under house arrest just keeps missing him. Ant-Mans business partner (Michael Pena) repeats old beer slogans. Some bad guys get injected with truth serum.
None of the storylines feel big enough for a movie and they don’t really integrate smoothly. The plot is sort of like a truck full of tube socks. Nobody gives a shit whether it makes it to the destination except the people selling them.
The sheer volume of subplots feels like a raw deal, too, like trading with the kid at lunch who offers volume for quality. Eight of his tomatoes for your Ding Dong. Why wouldn’t you do that? Eight tomatoes is a lot! Usually, though, all you want is the Ding Dong, not a bunch of fruit. The movie would have been a fuckload better with more simplicity and fewer moving parts.
This is Marvel, which means there is some clumsy attempt to give everyone a sympathetic motivation. Well, except the arms dealer. He’s just fucked. He could be dying of cancer and just want to be loved and all anyone would think about is his fucking forehead. Ghost misses her dead mom, just like Wasp misses her missing mom, just like probably Ant-Man and every other fucking Marvel hero, and Bambi and Nemo and Dumbo miss their God damn mothers.
After Wasp and Pops get Mom out of the Quantum Realm, the mother touches Ghost’s face and says, “I can feel your pain.” Ghost replies with the emotional depth and profundity that only Marvel can manage: “It hurts.” Well, yes, that tends to be what pain does. And that’s as touching as Ant-Man and the Wasp gets.
The entire movie is based on pseudo-science horseshit. They throw the word quantum around like drunken millennials do “spice” and “mango.” The movie shows no effort to understand physics, just use it because it sounds cool. So, we get oversimplifications stacked onto outright nonsense piled on top of mumbo-jumbo. None of it even adjacent to actual science.
That could be fun if the movie’s premise didn’t require more than just normal suspension of disbelief. There was a study once of what supernatural things people will or will not easily believe. Teleportation: believable. The ability to fly: believable. Super-strength: believable. Shrinking buildings to the size of carry-ons with a handle and rollers? Not so much. Being able to displace mass is a hard sell, and basing an entire movie on it is forcing that hard sell on an audience for two hours. It’s like a sitting through a timeshare salespitch.
When I think of action and adventure, the first thing that comes to mind is Dell computers and Hyundai sedans. Before the movie, one of Ant-Mans’s actors came on screen to tell us all to keep an eye out for Dell computers during the movie! Boy, what a fun thing to do, what a joyful treat to see the exact same computers assholes in offices use right there in the movie I’m watching. And to have an actor tell me to watch for them! Hyundai, too, shelled out big bucks to have a shitload of its Korean Camrys up there. When the movie requires a hotted up sports car, even that is Hyundai hatchback with flames painted on its sides. Fun! We can all see the respect this movie has for its audience over its marketers. A proud moment in cinema, for sure.
Not surprising, though. This is a movie made by committee, one where everyone got an equal say: financiers, marketing department, ad sales. And when they all got done, they let a screenwriter try to tie it all together. I can listen to a better story told quicker for free from long ago, thanks. Two Fingers for Ant-Man and the Wasp.