‘Ant-Man and the Wasp’ and the New Era of Marvel Humor

Author: Nick Allen / Source: The Hollywood Reporter

[This story contains spoilers for Ant-Man and the Wasp.]

A goofy sense of humor isn’t just the special charm that makes the Ant-Man movies stand out in the Marvel Cinematic Universe. It’s the element that holds all of its wild concepts together, whether the films are articulating the terrifying and physical possibility of going subatomic, or selling viewers on the excitement of heroes that can change sizes at the press of a button.

This focus on comedy provides a elasticity with tone which helps Ant-Man and the Wasp prove it was more than just a breather from Thanos’ apocalypse in Avengers: Infinity War.

Directed by Peyton Reed as an action-comedy that’s heavy on the comedy, the film takes on comparably smaller stakes than other MCU movies, but is fueled by character work and a winning taste for comedy. After the events of Captain America: Civil War, Scott Lang is snuck out from house arrest by Hope van Dyne (Evangline Lilly) and Dr. Hank Pym (Michael Douglas) to help bring the missing Janet (Michelle Pfeiffer) out of a subatomic state. At the same time, their technology is being pursued by a woman named Ghost (Hannah John-Kamen), who is assisted by a former friend of Dr. Pym’s, Laurence Fishburne’s Bill Foster, and Walton Goggins’ greedy Sony Burch, who wants to make a lot of money off of the Quantum technology.

If its hero weren’t so down to earth in a naturally funny way, or if the comedy seemed like it was trying too hard, the entire concept wouldn’t work. Perhaps the best example of comedy’s power in Ant-Man and the Wasp comes at the midway point, when Bill and Ghost have tied up Scott, Hope and Hank and are explaining their evil plan.

In a lot of other movies, this would be played straight, but in this film, Scott’s phone rings. It’s his daughter, and he thinks it might be an emergency. We find out soon enough, as Bill holds the phone in front of Ant-Man’s face pretending he isn’t in captivity, that it’s not a pressing issue.

While they use their unique hero in an often-standard narrative form, the Ant-Man movies have a special comedy storytelling tool with scenes featuring Michael Pena’s Luis, a former criminal accomplice of Lang’s who returns in the sequel trying to get his X-CON security company off the ground….

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