Critic Reviews

Ant-Man and the Wasp is a vast improvement on “Ant-Man” (2015) — and one of the most entertaining releases from Marvel Studios.

It’s fast, it’s funny, it’s superficial, it’s full of likable stars and scientific mumbo-jumbo, and, above all, it taps into the human urge to see big things become little and little things get big. It’s as close to lizard-brain entertainment as superhero blockbusters get, and as the mercury pushes toward 100, I’ll take it.

Boasting some of the most creative action scenes and finely-calibrated comedy in the Marvel universe so far, Ant-Man and The Wasp doesn’t reinvent the wheel, but it certainly knows how to make the ride even more fun.

Ant-Man & The Wasp somehow manages to organize laughs, action, theme, small MCU connections and even fairly touching ideas about family, responsibility and what it means to be a hero all housed inside of an undersized blockbuster.

Given how much of the film is spent on watching tiny items grow to improbable size, and huge objects shrink down to the scale of toys, it seems only appropriate that Ant-Man and the Wasp neatly balances its big, serious concerns with its little petty ones. It’s a movie that understands all the variances of scale, and takes the audience along for the ride as they constantly change.

Ant-Man and the Wasp has a pleasingly breakneck, now-you-see-it-now-you-don’t surreal glee. It’s a cunningly swift and delightful comedy of scale.

Paul Rudd and his equally likeable cast mates find the heart and humour in familiar comic-book theatrics, resulting in a film which is less concerned with generating awe than in delivering plenty of goofy grins.

Ant-Man and the Wasp is firmly on the B-movie end of the Marvel spectrum, a happy enough place to be: clacking along with all its bug friends, for the moment unfussed about Thanos and geopolitics. It seems pretty nice. Would that we could wrestle the rest of the world down to that same agreeable scale.

Ant-Man and the Wasp is a movie of deliberately low stakes and, for that very reason, enormous charm.

With inventive action and a gag-rate that bests most comedies, Ant-Man and the Wasp is the kind of slick entertainment you’ve come to expect from the MCU, with Rudd and Lilly’s winning double act at the centre.