Ant-Man and the Wasp

Ant-Man and the Wasp

I still haven't seen Avengers: Infinity War, because honestly I've come to terms with the Marvel movies just not really being my thing. I like the Guardians of the Galaxy movies because they feel like they're made by an actual filmmaker with a unique point of view, but most of the films feel like they're all manufactured from the same machine. Which they are. Ant-Man and the Wasp is no exception.

The main problem I have is that it all feels very lazy. It's a comedy, but the jokes mostly stem from "awkward moments", which don't work in movies because that awkward moment is actually very specifically written, planned, and shot (look up Dan Harmon's "Monopoly Guy" rant on his podcast Harmontown to hear more about this phenomenon). When the humor isn't awkward it's still ironically detached and often delivered in the form of lazy stock jokes that are used in a million lazy movies.

Okay, so the comedy isn't groundbreaking, but hey it's a Marvel movie, it's really just supposed to be fun. Except it's not. It's boring. There's absolutely no stakes or any reason to care at all about anything that happens in the entire movie. I never once felt like anyone was genuinely in danger or were even experiencing real emotions. I was never thrilled by any of the action scenes. I didn't laugh at the comedy. I couldn't enjoy the movie at all because I didn't feel like anyone behind the scenes was enjoying making it. It's all so distant and sanitized that not a speck of it felt real, and therefore it wasn't exciting or even interesting to watch. So much can be done with Ant-Man and his powers, but they practically go out of their way to not be creative with him. It would be frustrating if I had a reason to care.

I know I keep digging into the humor here, but the movie also bothers to do observational humor like Ant-Man saying "How did he get a ticket for the ferry so fast?" when a bad guy is suddenly getting away on a ferry. If this was consistent it would be fine, but instead it makes things like Michelle Pfeiffer having perfect make-up on after being trapped in the Quantum Realm for decades all the more obviously wrong. If you're going to point out little things that are wrong in your own movie, we're going to notice everything else that's wrong. It takes no effort to point out a mistake, it takes a lot of effort not to make one. There's no effort here.

I like Paul Rudd. He's very charming and funny. His performance in the original Wet Hot American Summer is one of the all-time comedic best, and he's delightful in everything else he's in. But he clearly didn't care about being in this movie. He delivers his lines without even remotely caring, he has absolutely no chemistry with Evangeline Lily (who doesn't even have enough of a part for me to tell if she cares or not), and he has a borderline look of actual pain in many of the scenes he's in. He's clearly just doing this for the money and couldn't care less about the final product (which I can't necessarily blame him for).

The only part of the movie I actually enjoyed was when they literally recycled a gag they did in the first movie, which is the Michael Pena flashback monologue. This is obviously one of the holdovers from Edgar Wright's original script from the first movie (as it's very much in his style), and it was so memorable they bothered to do it again in the second movie. It's the only part that genuinely feels fun because the cast and crew seem to actually be into doing it. No other part of the movie feels like this.

The first Ant-Man isn't exactly a great film either, but one of the things that's fun about it is that it's equal parts superhero movie and heist movie. Ant-Man and the Wasp doesn't seem to fit into any genre, which is a huge part of its problem. Genres are great for big-budget films because the filmmaker can then know what the tone is and really lean into it. This movie never leans into anything because it has no idea what it is. Is it a comedy? Not exactly. Superhero movie? Barely. Heist movie? Not this time. The most prominent genres seems to be action and sci-fi, but there's not enough of either of those for that to work either. Writers need to make strong tonal choices for their material, otherwise it's wishy-washy and unfocused, which this movie suffers from. I can't even tell who the villain of the movie is. Is it Walton Goggins? I hope not, cause he's in three scenes total. Is it Hannah John-Kamen as Ghost? No, she unsurprisingly turns out to be a good guy. So there's not really any central threat, which is pretty important for a big-budget popcorn movie.

I know this is brutal, and I'm not saying you're a bad person if you enjoyed this movie, but I think these Marvel filmmakers are starting to get used to their movies making money regardless of quality and it's preventing them from being passionate and creative. The Marvel movies feel less like movies at this point and more like two hour episodes of a TV show, not only because of their episodic nature, but because they all look and feel the exact same, even when they bother to get cool filmmakers like Taika Waititi. They're still making millions of people happy, which is great, but that's really only because of the preexisting characters and stories that they had the money to buy. The filmmaking is still lazy, and I'd rather spend those two hours watching something that someone worked hard to make because they truly loved what they were making.