Ant-Man and the Wasp (Reed) 2018

After the heaviness of Infinity War, the MCU took a little turn to add a dose of humor to the Marvel Cinematic Universe in the final installment released in 2018.

After being teased in the post credits scene of the first Ant-Man film, director Peyton Reed makes good on his promise to see a lot more of the Wasp suit in this film and Evangeline Lilly does it great justice. We are introduced to several new characters for Wasp and Ant-Man (Paul Rudd) to face off against including low-level criminal Sonny Birch (Walton Goggins) and Ghost (Hannah John-Kamen) who can phase straight through matter, including other people.

While there are multiple plot lines throughout the film, the central story has Hank Pym (Michael Douglas) and Hope van Dyne (Lilly) continuing their quantum realm work from a secret laboratory after being forced into hiding as known associates of Scott Lang. Lang is under house arrest while working to build his reputation up as the owner of a security company with the help of Luis (Michael Peña), Dave (Tip "T.I." Harris), and Kurt (David Dastmalchian). 

Meanwhile, Ghost/Ava is working with Pym's former colleague Bill Foster (Lawrence Fishburn) to devise a way to limit or eliminate her phasing, which is slowly killing her. This puts her at odds with Hank and Hope since they are all after the same technology while the feds are constantly after Lang, assuming that he will break his house arrest and end up back in prison for a long time.

While there is plenty of humor here, there are a lot of serious points as well. One of the best combinations of serious and humorous comes when Janet van Dyne (Michelle Pfeiffer) gets channeled through Lang's mind and helps Hank and Hope figure out a problem they hadn't been able to get by in their research. Rudd nails the delivery of the scene including the part at the end when he "wakes up," not understanding what just happened.

Ant-Man and the Wasp was not nominated for and Oscars last year.

Despite falling off the main story line from Infinity War, I feel like this is still a key piece of the puzzle leading up to Endgame and should be watched before that film.

7 out of 10

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