The thing that makes “Ant-Man” so fun is the way it toys with its CGI effects by making big things look like toys, and toys looking like big things. That’s why you get giant salt shakers and Hello Kitty Pez dispensers, and why you get hot cars looking like Hot Wheels toys.

That and the fact that Paul Rudd has the Marvel humor that both Robert Downey Jr., and Chris Pratt possess. He’s fun as Ant-Man, and in the sequel, “Ant-Man and the Wasp,” he continues his charms, while the CGI effects toy with him.

The following takes place 95% before Thanos snapped his fingers.

The story involves Hope (Evangeline Lilly) and her father Dr. Hank Pym (Michael Douglas) finding a way to free her mother Janet (Michelle Pfeiffer), A.K.A Wasp, from an extradimensional place called the “Quantum Realm.” If you don’t know what it is, it’s a place that is said to be inescapable when you shrink yourself tinier than an ant. Ant-Man, however, managed to escape in the last movie, and ergo, Janet could still be alive.

Scott (Ant-Man) is finishing up a 2-year house arrest sentence with an FBI agent (Randall Park) hoping to throw his a** in jail. Hope and Hank break him out with a giant ant wearing his ankle monitor, and as much as they’re mad at him for making them go on the run from the FBI, they need him to help them make their tunnel to the Quantum Realm work.

However, they have to deal with two adversaries-one more meaningful than the other. The meaningful one is Ava (Hannah John-Kamen), A.K.A Ghost, who has a phasing problem after a lab accident that killed her parents. Both she and Hank’s old partner (Laurence Fishburne) are looking to steal their lab (literally they shrunk it), so she can cure herself. You really feel the pain in her character, the way you felt Danny Devito’s Penguin in “Batman Returns.” But I’m in the wrong universe. Sorry about that.

And the unnecessary one is a black market dealer named Sunny Burch (Walton Goggins), who has the missing piece to the tunnel, and he goes back on his deal with Hope, just so he can buy Hank’s lab. There is a funny sequence in which one of his henchmen (Divian Ladwa) gives Scott’s boys (Michael Pena, T.I., and David Dastmalchian) a truth serum, and he think’s it isn’t.

But this character threatens to consume Ghost’s emotional side. In fact, he has to give her, Ant-Man, and the Wasp a chase through San Francisco just to get the lab, but they respectively have their own ambitions. That chase works like a charm, but this isn’t about him, it’s about them.

There are a lot of physics talk in “Ant-Man and the Wasp,” which can be pretty distracting. For those of you who are unfamiliar with the MCU, you may be thrown off by it. But then again, “A Wrinkle in Time” was a worse movie, so this movie succeeds.

The jokes are funny, the special effects are amazing, Rudd, Lilly, John-Kamen, Pena, and Douglas nail their roles, and it has something for Marvel fans, young and old. In a recent trend of summer movies, “Jurassic Park: Fallen Kingdom” was too big to be good
(actually it’s bad) and “Solo: A Star Wars Story” was lackadaisical in both its imagination and narrative. “Ant-Man and the Wasp,” on the other hand, is goofy fun, if not a masterpiece.

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Categories: Action, Adventure, comedy, Fantasy, Sci Fi, Sequel