Ant-Man and the Wasp is the big movie this week. Here are some notes on’t, prepared for Dublin City FM’s Sunday Breakfast with Patrick Doyle early this morning.
Ant-Man and the Wasp is not as funny as it needs to be. Edgar Wright was booted off the original, but some of his script and sensibility survived. Not so here. Peyton Reed is no visual stylist, and the funniest moments tend to be centred around Michael Pena and the comedy of getting derailed by tangents; as John Cleese once described Michael Palin and Terry Jones’ typical approach to scripting. Pena and his co-workers get derailed by Danishes for breakfast, the truthiness of truth serum, the existence of the Baba Yaga, and the Moz nature of his grandmother’s jukebox. All of which is a merciful relief from a film with three villains, two of whom aren’t really villains, and none of whom make much impact. Five writers are credited with this work and one imagines pages flying around at random, some with jokes, others with blank pages and INSERT SCENE: SOMETHING SOMETHING QUANTUM written on them. It remains baffling to the end how Paul Rudd was able to enter the quantum realm and leave again not a bother on him while Michelle Pfeiffer got stuck there for thirty years.
Talking Movies 