Ant-Man and the Wasp Review

Arriving in the wake of the franchise's darkest picture, this one plays as palate cleanser and knows it. The stakes are domestic: a man under house arrest, a daughter's birthday, a mother stuck in a subatomic space, and a building that can be shrunk into a rolling suitcase. Reed's set pieces are the most inventive in the run for pure physical comedy, a car chase through San Francisco where vehicles change size mid corner, a candy dispenser deployed as a weapon, a fight in a kitchen conducted at three scales simultaneously.

Evangeline Lilly is finally allowed to be the better fighter and the film is sharper for it. Michael Pena gets a second flashback aria and lands it. The problems are the villain and the plot: Ghost has a sympathetic condition and no dramatic function, Walton Goggins plays a generic black market buyer who could be cut entirely without anyone noticing, and the whole thing runs on a portable lab that keeps getting stolen back and forth. Amiable, minor, and handed a devastating ending it did nothing whatsoever to earn.