Ant-Man and the Wasp

Them!

Grade: B –

Director: Peyton Reed

Starring: Paul Rudd, Evangeline Lilly, Michael Peña, Michael Douglas, Laurence Fishburne, Hannah John-Kamen, Walton Goggins, and Michelle Pfeiffer

MPAA Rating: PG-13

Running Time: 1 hr. 58 min.

Ant-Man and the Wasp registers as a slight, but otherwise witty diversion amid the Marvel Cinematic Universe. As complimentary as that may sound, it’s the same curve used to grade Thor: Ragnarok. And Guardians of the Galaxy. And certain elements of Spider-Man: Homecoming. And the first Ant-Man. The quirky exceptions in the MCU have become the norm, and as has we learned with Guardians Vol. 2, droll diversions that don’t develop a sensible, substantive underpinning flounder when stripped of their sense of discovery.

Director Peyton Reed returns for Ant-Man and the Wasp, this time aided by five credited screenwriters who notably don’t include Edgar Wright (unlike Ant-Man). The mishmash plot feels both busy and barren, erected around a standard four-pronged framework: good guys, bad guys (who aren’t truly bad), the cops, and the foil. Janet van Dyne (Michelle Pfeiffer), wife of Dr. Hank Pym (Michael Douglas) and mother to Hope (Evangeline Lilly), was lost in the Quantum Realm decades ago, and now the good guys wants to find and free her. They reluctantly enlist the help of erstwhile Ant-Man Scott Lang (Paul Rudd), who apparently mind-melded or whatever with Janet when he drifted into the Quantum Realm during the last movie.

The “bad” gal is Ava Foster, aka Ghost (Hannah John-Kamen), who lost her parents as a child during a science accident that also left her afflicted with an ultimately fatal ability to phase through objects and dimensions. The U.S. government previously conscripted Foster as a kid into a life working as an espionage assassin, a past we learn via montage even though it’s really the movie we’d far rather see.

Foster wants a cure, with the help of an ex-S.H.I.E.L.D. scientist (Laurence Fishburne), and her plan involves draining healing power from the Quantum Realm even if it kills Janet, though as the story unfolds, it becomes obvious to everyone except Foster that if she just waits literally a minute or two, both aims could be accomplished.

The cops are around only because they’re trying to catch Lang violating the two years of house arrest he’s serving for violating the Sokovia Accords back in Avengers: Civil War. Like much of Ant-Man and the Wasp, this is a cute subplot that quickly become wearisome, a description that also applies to our foil, Sonny Burch (Walton Goggins), a black market widget dealer whose function in this narrative menagerie is specious and unnecessary.

Oh, there are also Lang’s workmates, who’d only clutter matters more if not for Michael Peña’s Luis, whose rapidfire repartee and oddball non sequiturs steal every scene and better suit Reed’s farcical sensibilities.

The rest of the film comprises a series of zippy action sequences built around the eponymous heroes, whose powers to shrink and enlarge both themselves and any other object now seem devoid of rules and limitations, besides Lang’s constantly malfunctioning suit. Hope is now the Wasp, inheriting her wingsuit from mom, but unlike Lang’s gradual indoctrination to heroism that formed the spine of Ant-Man, Hope is already busily bustling around at the start of this sequel.

It’s refreshing that there isn’t an infinity stone in sight or people vaporizing into ash (well, if you stick around long enough …). While the film is breezy and light, it never feels like much is really at stake, and the kooky caper that remains seems stitched together. Ant-Man and the Wasp still generates buzz, but it doesn’t have much sting.

The Family

What is that which gives me joy? Gangster roles!

Grade: B+

Director: Luc Besson

Starring: Robert De Niro, Michelle Pfeiffer, Tommy Lee Jones, Dianna Agron and John D’Leo

MPAA Rating: R

Running Time: 1 hr. 52 min.

One scene binds the satirical layers of French director Luc Besson’s The Family. Playing a former Brooklyn mob boss now posing as a writer under federal witness protection in a remote village in northwest France, Robert De Niro is invited to a gathering of the town’s local film society. When the night’s original featured film, Some Came Running, falls through, its replacement is another distinctly American film from “Monsieur Scorsese.” And so we see an aging De Niro, the flicker of a film projector haloing his head, smiling wryly at the opening moments of Goodfellas.

Here, Besson encapsulates the whole of his adaptation of Tonino Benacquista’s novel “Malavita.” First, the film is an elegy to the glorified American movie gangster, embodied in the visage of a goodfella who didn’t stay on top or die living the life, but instead chose to snitch on his mob family in order to save his real family and now wiles away his later years in foreign exile. Indeed, it’s not a stretch to analogize De Niro’s Giovanni Manzoni—living under the assumed name Fred Blake—to Henry Hill about 16 years after the end of Goodfellas.

The film also spotlights the French’s simultaneous abhorrence of Americans and adoration of American culture. When the Blakes host a cookout, the neighbors line up to sample hamburgers and other American cuisine, while at the same time snobbishly sniffing at Fred’s attempts to ignite his charcoal grill. When Fred’s wife Maggie (Michelle Pfeiffer) dares ask a local grocer if he stocks peanut butter, the faux pas is met with a string of whispered insults that Maggie answers by blowing up the store.

Beyond the provocative allegory, what keeps the film entertaining is its knowing casting and its breezy, offbeat comedic script. While the Blake clan may have moved overseas, they brought their mob mentality with them. Normandy is only the latest landing spot for Fred, who has been uprooted by his federal minder Robert Stansfield (Tommy Lee Jones) several times due to Fred’s anger issues. Warren (John D’Leo) is a hustler in training who begins working the angles the first day at his new high school. Meanwhile, teenage daughter Belle (Dianna Agron, a long way from Glee) is an acute mix of her mother’s beauty and her father’s hair-trigger temper.

There’s a subplot involving Fred’s investigation into local water supply (perhaps a nod to Chinatown), as well as his attempt at writing his memoirs using an old Brother typewriter, an endeavor dissuaded by Stansfield. Even a seemingly throwaway aside by Warren about the varied uses of the f-word is slyly revisited following a film-ending cataclysm.

It’s no secret that Besson’s films, and the Cinéma du look French film movement he helped form, are heavily influenced by New Hollywood cinema and modern Hollywood action movies. In this way, The Family—particularly its violent final act—is also Besson’s sardonic response to the longstanding criticism that his work is too slick, commercial and “Hollywood,” lodged by countrymen harboring their own predilection for Yankee pop culture.