ANT-MAN AND THE WASP

            ANT-MAN AND THE WASP 

The sequel wastes no time establishing its confidence with a two-part intro, and it's deft at summing the series up in show-don't-tell fashion. First stop: a back-in-time reminder of Ant-Man's powers, and a refresher on the first film's subatomic drama. We watch the elder Dr. Pym (Michael Douglas) and his wife Janet van Dyne (Michelle Pfeiffer) use their Ant-Man and Wasp suits to save the world in the '50s. Janet shrinks herself impossibly small to defuse a bomb, and Dr. Pym thinks she's been lost to a quantum realm.

Second stop: a modern-day catch-up in which Scott "Ant-Man" Lang (Paul Rudd) and his daughter stage a dramatic heist... through a series of cardboard tunnels that dad has constructed. (One of them forces the duo to crawl through "security lasers" made of yarn.) He had time to make this silly, heartwarming maze, it turns out, because of an Avengers-related arrest that put Lang in house arrest for years. This opening sequence, full of other elaborate set pieces, feels like the best stuff in Pee-Wee's Big Adventure and does wonders to cement the film's tone.

The two plot threads soon unite. Dr. Pym has been inspired by Lang's ability to survive a subatomic journey in the last film, so he and his daughter Hope (Evangeline Lilly) create new technologies to hunt for Janet. When their first attempt goes awry, Scott has a bizarre dream... from Janet's perspective. Hours later, Pym kidnaps Scott, believing that he's the key to bringing Janet back.

Pym spends the rest of the film facing various demons—guilt about his wife, ramifications about being brash to former colleagues—while Lang wrestles with obligations and a constant feeling that he's letting everyone down. Along the way, two villains emerge, but Ant-Man and the Wasp's best quality is its focus on the protagonists' internal struggles, as opposed to pretending that either a sniveling mob-boss (Walton Goggins) or a shape-shifting lab accident (Hannah John-Kamen as Ghost) are going to top our heroes. That doesn't mean this is some plodding emo film. Instead, the leads get the plot elasticity they need to cement their hero status.