Why The New 'Ant-Man' Is Way Better Than Any Of The 'Avengers' Sequels

ant-man & the wasp

“Oh, that’s bad-ass!” yelps Michael Peña, mid-way through a car-chase, in which San Francisco streets — so steep, so tight, so zig-zaggy — are once again used to add colour, character, and degree-of-difficulty to one of action-cinema’s most evergreen tropes. Peña’s own colourful character is comic-relief, again, in Ant-Man & The Wasp, but all his boyish, puppy-dog enthusiasm, his bright-eyed wonder, and his excitable babble eventually turn him into something else: an on-screen avatar for audience fanboys. As he reaction-gifs his way through action set-pieces —full of superlatives all the while— his giddy excitement is like a meta-layer; his character, like the audience, filled with delight at witnessing all the ‘cool’ shit herein, lapping up another cinematic product from our multiplex overlords at Marvel.

And Ant-Man & The Wasp — the follow-up to 2015’s Ant-Man, with director Peyton Reed returning — feels like a familiar MCU entry. So familiar that, for those prizing popcorn-flick fluff. It’s light, funny, fast-moving, brightly-coloured, and ultimately non-threatening. The villains aren’t very villainous, the drama doesn’t get too weighty, and the grand finale comes off without a hitch. Even in the post-credits, where the timeline meets up with the end of the last Avengers —and beloved characters are turned to ash— death itself doesn’t seem too scary.

In true MCU fashion, Ant-Man & The Wasp doesn’t pick up where the previous Ant-Man left off, but comes, instead, in the wake of Captain America: Civil War. Paul Rudd’s titular dad is on house-arrest, killing time —with karaoke, drum-playing, learning magic tricks, reading The Fault In Our Stars — rather than fighting crime. But, soon Evangeline Lilly and Michael Douglas blow back into his life, with size-changing suits and gleaming teach on hand, ready to be undertake a Finding Pfeiffer rescue mission on the sub-atomic level.

The antagonists trying to stop them are varied, played for either sympathetic pathos or entry-level lulz. Hannah John-Kamen is a shape-shifting wraith — with tragic backstory — ruthlessly searching for the cure to the ‘molecular disequilibrium’ that lets her pass through walls, but will be her undoing. She’s aided by Laurence Fishburne, hopping from DC to Marvel in a corduroy-on-corduroy outfit that lets you know he’s a scientist. Walton Goggins is a sleazy businessman selling black-market tech, who wants a cut of any quantum-related developments. And Randall Park is a bumbling FBI agent, whose attempts to catch Rudd out of his house are forever foiled, making him a comic foil seemingly on loan from a sitcom.

Ultimately, Ant-Man & The Wasp is a comedy, though it’s more of the mildly-amusing variety than, say, the absurdist lunacy of Thor: Ragnarok. There’s a great running gag about truth serum, a fleeting moment of Morrissey iconography that’ll delight the maladjusted, and, after a Gregg Turkington cameo last time, Tim Heidecker shows up, here. The film’s favourite device —played for both action-movie invention and laughs— is the shrinking and embiggening of various things; from cars reduced to matchbox size to Hello Kitty pez dispensers and salt shakers made massive.

All of it amounts to a pleasing lark, at once family-friendly, warm-hearted, and dripping with wry self-awareness. As with the last Ant-Man movie, Ant-Man & The Wasp is blessed by its proximity to the Avengers mothership. Each film came out in the wake of one of the MCU’s clusterflicks — Avengers: Age Of Ultron and Avengers: Infinity War, respectively — and comes off looking good by such contrast. Rather than world-ending bombast and IP pile-ups, Ant-Man & The Wasp happily occupies a smaller realm. It’s unambitious 3-star entertainment, two hours of crowd-pleasing time-killing.

sicario: day of the soldado

Sicario 2: Day Of The Soldado is a film that demands a form of mental dissociation familiar to sufferers of sequelitis. As a standalone movie, its menacing portrait of the US/México border — a place of human and drug trafficking, where laws matter to neither drug cartels nor the militarised US DEA — would likely play as a revelation: a stark, minimal, mean, very-lean action-movie, shorn of the normal revenge/justice motivations and moralisings of the genre. Audiences, in many ways, are invited to try and convince themselves they’re just watching a standalone movie, otherwise the entirety of this very-good film ultimately feels like a failure. As in: for all the successes of Day Of The Soldado, it pales in comparison to the original Sicario.

That 2015 film was a huge surprise, an action flick that played like an art-movie, a military mission operating at operatic tenor. Directed by Denis Villeneuve, it was a scorched-Earth thriller in which the tension was ratcheted up to unbearable degrees; its every sequence feeling slowly suffocating. Villeneuve was clearly a filmmaker working on an elevated level (he’d gone on to make Arrival and Blade Runner 2049, making for quite a run), aided by collaborateurs —DOP Roger Deakins, composer Jóhann Jóhannsson— that took the film to exalted, unexpected levels.

Here, the filmmaking is more functional, with Italian director Stefano Sollima (Suburra, the Gomorrah TV series) lacking the formalism to, say, hold shots long enough for the tension to become smothering. In a memorable sequence, kidnapped Isabela Moner, the daughter of a cartel kingpin, watches a fire-fight between crooked-cops and US military from beneath a car. When the shots are anchored to her POV, peering out from a hiding place at bullets and bodies flying, there’s a great sense of in-the-fray terror. But Sollima restlessly cuts away, prizing coverage over any sense of compositional claustrophobia.

In turn, Tyler Sheridan —the screenwriter of the original— widens the canvas the second time around. Sicario was about an agent dragged into a war riddled with corruption, immorality, and naked lust for power; a singular journey that echoed the stylistic choice to make the film an essentially experiential thriller. Here, Sherdian’s script casts a vaster net; the film flying off, early, to Djibouti and Somalia, and even heading to away-from-the-border metropolises like Kansas City and México City. There’s no singular figure at the centre; instead there’s various figures —like Benicio del Toro and Josh Brolin, reprising their old roles— scattered around.

Here, Sheridan doesn’t let the conflicts —both armed and moral— simply suggest greater forces, but pulls out to look at the bigger picture. As screenwriting decision, there’s nothing wrong with this. Except, when it comes to the thorny matter of comparison. The larger-scope of the film, in that way, suggests the uphill battle of the whole: Day Of The Soldado suffering only when it’s compared its predecessor.