Ant-Man and the Wasp is a charming, nimble showcase for the Wasp

Marvel scheduled three movies to come out this year. One was the long-awaited solo debut of a hero who finally reflected the people who hadn’t yet seen themselves in Earth’s Mightiest Heroes. The other was promised to be the most ambitious Marvel crossover event ever, a massive ensemble movie that would nudge the company’s cinematic universe in a new direction. And the third movie was … the sequel to Ant-Man.

Competing with the seismic shock of Avengers: Infinity War or the indomitable triumph of Black Panther would put just about any movie at an unfair disadvantage, including the perfectly enjoyable Ant-Man and the Wasp.

That’s the problem with Marvel’s grand design. Because all these movies are intended to fuse together into a great unified whole, certain films get stuck in a holding pattern, unable to push existing characters or ongoing stories forward in meaningful ways. The infamous finger snap in Infinity War not only sealed the fate of some of Marvel’s favorite Avengers, but also all but ensured that nothing game-changing was going to happen in the MCU until 2019’s Avengers 4.

The question surrounding Ant-Man and the Wasp, then, isn’t how it pushes the MCU forward, but rather what director Peyton Reed (returning to the franchise after stepping in to direct the first Ant-Man following Edgar Wright’s departure from the film) and his winsome crew do within the small pocket of space and time afforded to them by Marvel’s grand plan.

Ant-Man and the Wasp is an airy, nimble piece of filmmaking: Reed’s confidence to unapologetically embrace weirdness — like imagery of ants playing drums or responding to telepathic commands — gives the franchise its distinctly playful spirit. His stars, Paul Rudd and Evangeline Lilly, reprise their roles and further energize Marvel’s most lovable romance. And the action sequences, with their constant, dynamic manipulation of size and scope, are as creative as they are thrilling. The film is bundles of fun, so much so that I found myself wishing it had a bit more to offer than just a good time at the movies.

Perhaps the single biggest criticism about 2015’s Ant-Man was that it fell into the shopworn trope of pairing a semi-competent and flawed male protagonist with a more talented and capable woman sidekick. Lilly’s Hope Van Dyne was the smarter, tougher, better-trained character, but the glory belonged to Rudd’s Scott Lang. The sequel seems to have read the room, accepted the feedback, and is determined to show us that all we need is Hope — which also means showing us how vulnerable Lang is.

Ant-Man and the Wasp picks up after the events of Captain America: Civil War. Lang, after teaming up with Cap’s squad, finds himself under house arrest following a knockout fight between Avengers in Berlin that leaves everyone either on the run or at the mercy of the government. As we learned (briefly) in Infinity War, he and Hawkeye took house-arrest deals because they have families.

Think about that as a comedic premise for a second: The rest of the superheroes are international renegades, forging alliances with Wakanda and zipping across the galaxy to help save the universe from the biggest threat it’s ever known. Ant-Man and his buddy Arrows McArrowface are under house arrest.

Meanwhile, Hope and her father Hank Pym (Michael Douglas) are focusing on the smallest of things: shrinking themselves to the Quantum Realm, the point where objects become subatomic, in hopes of finding Hope’s mother/Hank’s wife, Janet Van Dyne (Michelle Pfeiffer), who disappeared in the Quantum Realm years earlier. It’s all very risky — as we’re told multiple times — because once you go to the Quantum Realm, you might never get out. And, as with laying eyes on Chris Evans’s Captain America for the first time, you will never be the same person you were before visiting the Quantum Realm.

Free from her no-nonsense, blunt bob and the constraints of the first movie’s character dynamic, Hope does all the heavy lifting to find her mother. She has to find the components to assemble the appropriate Quantum Realm apparatus. She applies science behind the Quantum Realm. She fights the mysterious villain who also has their eye on Janet and the Quantum Realm. All the while, she’s babysitting her still very irritable father and Scott Lang.

Meanwhile, under house arrest, Lang has been replaced by a giant ant.

Unlike some of its Marvel cousins whose action scenes look as if they’ve been shot through garbage disposals, whirred and jolted into existence, Ant-Man and the Wasp’s sequences are all about controlled chaos — tiny things getting cosmically and comically large, or vice versa — and letting the physics of that dynamic, rather than a flurry of punches, tickle your brain. And the movie fully acknowledges that Hope is the more adept superhero by letting her lead the way in these sequences.

She shrinks into micro-existence to dodge bullets, balloons to full size to land punches, and tears through the air on buzzy little wings (wings that Pym didn’t see fit to give to Lang). Lang is often relegated to the role of audience surrogate, watching Hope go to work along with the rest of us.

The drawback is that the story, co-written by Chris McKenna, Erik Sommers, Rudd, Andrew Barrer, and Gabriel Ferrari, is sometimes more about purpose than it is about the people. Outside of a couple of bursts of comedy, flicks of romance, and a few eyerolls at the men in her life who can’t get it together, Hope is still a character largely defined by her excellence, rather than a fully realized person who happens to be excellent.

Don’t get me wrong: Being a kick-ass hero is an achievement for the women of the MCU, who have, especially in the early part of this 10-year-old universe, been mostly relegated to the role of girlfriend (see: Potts, Pepper; Foster, Jane), doting mom (see: every hero’s mom), or damsel in distress. This has gotten better of late (see: Guardians of the Galaxy’s Gamora, Thor: Ragnarok’s Valkyrie, and Black Panther’s Shuri and Dora Milaje), but even as of this month, not a single MCU film has afforded more than 40 percent of its screen time to female characters. This film dedicating so much of its runtime to Wasp holding her own and being celebrated for it is a big step in the right direction.

But fleshing out Hope’s attachment to her mother, or how she feels about Scott and his penchant for letting her down, would give the film a stronger center, and give Lilly more to chew on with her performance. It’s easy to admire the Wasp’s superpowered feats, but giving her a little more heart alongside her competence would make the character feel like a person worth rooting for, in addition to a hero.

The film’s gender dynamics aren’t the only evolution Ant-Man and the Wasp suggests for the MCU. It also suggests some fascinating things about the future of superhero families.

Over the last few years, Marvel has become a bad dad factory.

In Guardians of the Galaxy 2, Star-Lord’s father Ego wants to take over the universe and screws a lot of women, literally and figuratively, to find an heir who will help him achieve that. (That’s saying nothing of Ego’s treatment of Mantis, Yondu’s own unique relationships with Star-Lord and Rocket, and Rocket becoming Groot’s adoptive father.)

Thor: Ragnarok reveals that Odin has been keeping a goddess of death-sized secret from his sons, a lie that put the entire universe at risk. Black Panther’s T’Chaka almost ensured the downfall of Wakanda because he couldn’t admit he made an egregious mistake. I don’t even want to begin untangling what Thanos thinks about fatherly love or the amount of abuse he’s imparted on Gamora and Nebula, nor do I want to delve too deeply into Tony Stark’s yearning to be a dad and how he’s projected that onto Peter Parker in Infinity War.

These movies are just as much about overcoming these bad relationships — abuse, even — as they are about saving the world; perhaps to some of these heroes, they’re one and the same. The aforementioned fathers (even Thanos to an extent) have all groomed their kids to be better versions of themselves, to be the heroes they couldn’t, in an effort to accomplish something they couldn’t do on their own.

Scott Lang doesn’t do that with his daughter, Cassie (Abby Ryder Fortson).

He explains why in the movie, plainly stating to Hope that leading Cassie into a life of heroism would make him a bad father. It’s not that he’s aware of the Marvel bad dads before him, but rather it’s Scott’s instinct to not mold Cassie in his image or promise her a destiny of superheroism. It worries him that she looks at him and his alter ego with such admiration, though he seems to be slightly oblivious to the attention.

Meanwhile, staring Scott right in the face is Hank, a father who seems to have stepped right off Marvel’s bad dad assembly line, effectively turning his daughter into the solution and absolution he seeks for his wife’s disappearance. Hank is the dad that Scott never wants to be, and that dynamic unlocks a deeper, messier emotional layer that undercuts the zip and pop of the film.

The film doesn’t tug on that thread too hard, though. It’s sort of thrown out there without any strong examination or reaction before we’re ushered along to the next visual gag, the next heist, or the next villain that needs to be defeated.

Yet that prickly view of fatherhood is what I kept coming back to as the fizz of the movie faded away. It makes Ant-Man and the Wasp feel like something more distinct than just the Ant-Man sequel, and helps it stand out from the other two movies Marvel put out this year. And if (more like when) Ant-Man and the Wasp return for another movie, I hope they’re allowed out of Marvel’s holding pattern and get to explore what parenthood really means in a superhero universe.