This frenzied mish-mash of Bollywood musical, martial arts actioner and comic book origin tale is told with an eye towards western cinematic sensibilities and an affectionate reverence of filmic pop culture.

It follows the travails of Surya (Abhimanyu Dassani, son of Indian screen star Bhagyashree), a young man with a rare disorder that also proves very handy: he has a congenital insensitivity to pain. His ailments also include a requirement for constant hydration, which necessitates wearing a backpack that stores a ready supply of water, though it tends to run dry at inopportune moments, meaning Surya has to come up with creative ways to imbibe H2O.

Throughout his formative years, Surya exists on a diet of Kung Fu and action movies and he teaches himself martial arts moves so that he can dispense vengeance on the gang that robbed his mother when he was a young baby, killing her in the process. Surya is always at the side of his best friend and childhood crush Supri (Radhika Madan), whose father is a violent drunk, forcing Surya to teach him some knuckle-sandwich infused home truths, ultimately putting Supri’s father in the hospital.

As a young man, Surya yearns to meet his idol, a one-legged martial arts guru named Karate Mani (Gulshan Devaiah), and after meeting him, Surya soon encounters his scenery-chewing evil twin, Jimmy (also played by Gulshan Devaiah). Soon, the adult Surya and Supri must fight the fight of their lives, defending themselves against henchman and street scum alike as Surya struggles to realise his childhood dream of being an unstoppable, karate-chopping, leg-sweeping, force for justice on the streets of Mumbai.

At times it’s so tight you’d think Edgar Wright was sneaking into the edit room, at other times the sequences are languid and baggy. That said, the overwhelming sense of joy and fun that Vasan Bala is having here – name-checking his Hollywood influences and designing inventive and crazy fight sequences – is contagious (though the amount of scenes depicting children being beaten is positively Dickensian). Street locations are brightly decorated and colourfully lensed and the soundtrack is tacky and sweet, making this slice of Bollywood geekdom a ton of fun. The running time, as you would expect, is over two hours but the reward is in the journey and there’s lots of fun to be had in this alternately goofy, melodramatic and surreal chop-sock-rom-com.

Love, Death & Robots has been up on Netflix for a week or so, this Heavy Metal magazine inspired anthology series is a mix of comedy, action, dark fantasy and hard-edged sci-fi. The Pretend one is currently screening in capital cities around the country and you can get info on where and when to see it, here: https://www.thepretendonefilm.com/

Anyway, today’s was a quick review, forgive my speedy rambling:

Two very different experiences this week: the continuation of an epic, cosmic sci fi thriller and a transgressive revenge thriller inflected with DePalma’s stylistics.

Looping time and self-therapy through repetition, ‘Russian Doll’ is a sharp, smart and caustically funny slice of genre entertainment. Here’s me waffling about it:

The 21st instalment in the Marvel Cinematic Universe is a hoot. Its goofy humour and Brie Larson’s titular hero’s search for her true identity, works in all the right ways. Here’s my review:

For your listening pleasure, my opinions:

There’s a stinky pall of cruel fate hovering over this retooling of 1989’s based-on-a-true-story TV movie, Billionaire Boys Club (which served as a starring vehicle for “Brat Packer” Judd Nelson). The story is a classic one: ‘80s excess and coke-fuelled youthful promise corrupted by greed and the sweaty-palmed clutch for cash.

Joe Hunt (Ansel Elgort) lives with his father, Ryan (Judd Nelson), and spends his days on the make, struggling to sell his stock market skills and coax over-cashed, feckless trust-fund brats into investing the money that their parents worked so very hard for. Enter Dean Karny (Taron Edgerton), an old school buddy whose ambition-fuelled trajectory intersects with Joe’s, and the two form an unholy alliance, as they spruik their “paradox philosophy”, a masturbatory exercise in business ethics and moral equivalency, conveniently negating morality and ethics that might serve to hinder money-making opportunities.

Such lunk-headed wisdom soon converts brothers, Scott Biltmore (Ryan Rottman) and Kyle Biltmore (Jeremy Irvine), who sign on board the fledgling BBC, an investment company which allegedly took its enigmatic acronym from “The Bombay Bicycle Club”, though once all the crooked and shady events had unspooled, it was dubbed by the media, “Billionaire Boys Club.”

BBC’s partners soon meet Ron Levin (Kevin Spacey in Swimming with Sharks mode), and it’s with Levin’s promise of mountains of investment cash that the young men’s dreams of mammon begin to take shape, and pretty soon it’s cavernous marble and glass apartments, coke lines on glass coffee tables, and pastel polo shirts with popped collars.

Though all is not what it seems, and the hustlers soon become the hustled, which eventually spirals into murderous deeds, orchestrating kidnappings, fraudulent Ponzi schemes and wrestling to the death with crazed, opium-addicted Iranians.

Look, this isn’t a bad film; in fact, it’s a fairly enjoyable cautionary yarn. Taron Egerton is slightly miscast as the conniving “Mean Dean” but he shoulders the part; Elgort offers much the same problem as he did in the catastrophically overrated Baby Driver: he’s a charisma vacuum and presents something of an issue in a story that requires audience connection with the plight of the lead character. Spacey is pretty good as the dodgy Ron Levin, hamming things up and sleazing his way through scenes.

Director James Cox (who previously directed Val Kilmer as porn icon John Holmes in Wonderland) really just copped an unlucky roll of the dice, in that this was the final performance of Kevin Spacey, before his career was immolated by the revelations of his predilection for aggressive sexual harassment. As a result, the film was shelved, and then after the dust settled on Spacey’s behaviour, and kicked into a measly theatrical release in order to honour contractual obligations. The resulting box office gross of $618 had to have been a kick in the teeth for the filmmakers; for Spacey, it’s something of a death knell for his cinematic career.

Overall, the treatment is too tepid to rub shoulders with The Wolf Of Wall Street and too derivative (despite being a true story) to set itself apart from other “impressionable guys getting in over their heads” movies (Oliver Stone’s return to the Wall Street well Money Never Sleeps and Todd Phillips’ War Dogs spring to mind). Okay movie, wrong actor, wrong time.

My perspective on the films of 2018. Plus some deeply rapid talking about the films coming up in 2019. Give it a listen…

THE OTHER SIDE OF THE WIND

In the late 60’s/early 70’s, when Orson Welles started filming his independently financed film The Other Side of the Wind, the former-wunderkind and globetrotting bon vivant seemed to have fully given himself over to his proclivities for food, drink and all things excessive. Welles in those years was extremely rotund, ebullient and endlessly energetic raconteur. In the years prior, he had independently made his films The Trial, Chimes at Midnight and Othello – with impressive results. But for this one, funding proved difficult, ultimately he found cash  backing from a Paris-based company associated with the Shah of Iran.  This unfinished film was completed by two of its original producers, with the help of Netflix, so the editing style and the tone are based on the notes and initial edits of Orson Welles himself. Given that Citizen Kane, Welles much lauded first film, was based on the real life travails of publishing magnate William Randolph Hearst – and is also about the death of its protagonist and the recollections of that protagonist by those who worked and lived alongside him - THIS film is something of a bookend to Citizen Kane as it ostensibly features a main character who is a blatant avatar for Welles and features a very ‘meta’ plot. It consists of two narrative conceits playing concurrently: The Other Side of the Wind is at once a shaky, hand-held documentary about the final day in the life of a master filmmaker who’s been relegated to the periphery of Hollywood - named Jake Hannaford (played by real-life Director of The Maltese Falcon and Treasure of the Sierra Madre, John Huston). Hannaford hosts a party to screen unfinished portions of his latest film, called The Other Side of the Wind, and he invites a gaggle of journalists, writers and showbiz hangers-on to tag along, follow him everywhere  - and then film and document every moment – like a bizarre proto-reality show. So the documentary parts of the film are cut together from the footage shot by the roving band of cameras. That ‘documentary’ is interrupted by sequences from Hannaford’s film-within-the-film, also called The Other Side of the Wind, which is essentially an arty-farty sexploitation film, which stars Croatian actress Oja Kodar – who was a collaborator, co-writer and lover of Welles – and it’s shot in an overly stylised and dramatic way that seems like Welles’ is making a parody of Ingmar Bergman and Michelangelo Antonioni films, mocking the emergent New Hollywood films of the time (Easy Rider’s Dennis Hopper features during the party scenes) and commenting on the death of the old style studio system. Overall, the film is very tongue-in-cheek in terms of its view of Hollywood and how it chews people up and spits them out. Stylistically it almost could’ve been an Altman film, with improvised, overlapping dialogue and unconventional editing much like Nashville.

Ultimately though, I was fascinated but not engaged – I personally found the film to be overshadowed by the circumstances it was created in, that said, it’s still quite fantastic that Netflix stepped in to see this project completed and distributed to a very wide audience - whether or not any of this might appeal to you is probably dependent on how intrigued you are by Welles as a creative force and his significance in the history of film.

THEY’LL LOVE ME WHEN I’M DEAD

This companion-piece documentary covers the production of The Other Side of the Wind which has also been produced by Netflix, it’s called They’ll Love Me When I’m Dead  - it lays out the 40-year journey this film has had to get to the screen. When Orson Welles follow-up to Citizen Kane, The Magnificent Ambersons, was taken from him and re-cut, Welles was disillusioned with Hollywood and wandered the European and American film landscape, very much as an outsider. He independently produced The Trial, Othello and Chime at Midnight, returning to Hollywood in 1958 to direct Charlton Heston (as a Mexican!) in Touch of Evil. Though it’s now considered a classic – at the time the studio’s hostility towards the film that Welles had made, caused Welles to leave the US and head for Europe, where he essentially became a journeyman, an actor for hire, ploughing his money into independent films. In 1985, Orson Welles died, the 100 odd hours of film footage sitting abandoned. The rights to the film were caught up in a legal rights hell and it was thought to be a lost project.

Frank Marshall was a young – and very green - producer on The Other Side of the Wind, but in the decades since then, he’s become a successful director/producer - producing every Spielberg film since Raiders of the Lost Ark – and his wife is Kathleen Kennedy, the Head of Lucasfilm at Disney – so he’s got the connections and the clout to pull together this uncompleted film and see it finished.

Overall, the ‘making of’ documentary and the film itself form a fascinating tale of Welles mercurial creative will. If the film isn’t to your tastes, I highly recommend the documentary, it’s a must-see for film fans and even for those with a passing interest in Hollywood history.

HOUSE OF CARDS - SEASON 6

House of Cards production was severely hampered by the revelations of it’s star Kevin Spacey’s conduct on and off the set. Season 6 was in doubt and it’s a surprise that the show-runners and stars were able to pivot so effectively and move ahead with Robin Wright in the lead. Not wanting to spoil it too much, but suffice to say the latest season opens with Wright’s US President Claire Underwood under siege -  being briefed by her Chief of Staff on the death threats that have been made against her. Claire is defiant, almost enjoying the hatred and vitriol that is flying her way - she breaks the fourth wall to talk to the camera, just as Frank did, though she’s more antagonistic and possibly even scarier than Frank. Greg Kinnear and Diane Lane play brother and sister conservative’s Annette and Bill Shepherd, who are essentially versions of the real-life billionaire Koch Brothers, though they have more personal ties to Frank and Claire and to the white house. They have their own agenda’s and when they don’t get their way, they threaten to complicate Claire’s presidency in pretty dark and unexpected ways. If anything, the show goes to great lengths to continue plot threads from a few seasons ago and to tie up loose ends with old characters, probably in an effort to balance the story in preparation for Claire  taking centre stage – but the needn’t have bothered – Robin Wright is brilliant in this - Frank’s spectre looms large over the proceedings – which – given just how awesome Robin Wright is in the lead – is a little bit unnecessary. Even so, this is a really enjoyable season – Claire was always something of a Lady Macbeth to Frank’s Macbeth – dark, scheming and capable – and more willing to cross moral and legal lines to get what she wants. It’s great that Wright gets to see this series to its conclusion by taking center stage. Highly recommended.

Between streaming and the cinema, there’s a bunch of stuff out there - here’s three recommendations:

In Panos Cosmatos’ 2010 Sci-Fi horror Beyond the Black Rainbow, the year 1983 symbolically loomed large as the setting for that film and its stylistic inspiration. For Panos (whose father George P. Cosmatos directed Cobra, Rambo: First Blood Part II & Tombstone) it is the year he was first exposed to the cluttered shelves of his local VHS rental store and the delights that lay within.

Panos’ Swedish mother, Birgitta Ljungberg-Cosmatos, was a sculptor and visual artist and, by his own admission, he’s heavily influenced by his parent’s artistic leanings, with his own cinematic style vacillating between the surreal arthouse and popcorn-fueled crowd-pleaser.

The film opens in an unnamed forest near the ‘Shadow Mountains’; it is 1983. Forestry worker Red Miller (Nicolas Cage) lives on the edge of the woods in a womb-like golden homestead with his lover Mandy Bloom (Andrea Riseborough). One day, through pure happenstance, a roaming LSD cult catches sight of Mandy near her home and they target her for abduction. The cult leader, Jeremiah Sand (Linus Roache) orders his Manson-family-esque minions to summon a group of disfigured, demonic homicidal bikers to aid them in their kidnapping and, ultimately, the motley Satanic group descend on Mandy and Red’s mountain-top home to enact their nefarious desires, leaving Red broken, traumatised and hell-bent on exacting a righteous, blood-lust fueled vengeance.

In Mandy Cosmatos draws on a similar visual palette to Beyond the Black Rainbow: drenched in ‘80s neon gloss, deep-focus anamorphic lensing with late, great composer Jóhann Jóhannsson (Sicario, Arrival) delivering a final stunning, sonic swansong of diegetic guitar riffs and epic dread-laden soundscapes.

Feeling like that awesome cosmic-horror VHS that you’ve just stumbled across on one of the lower shelves in the horror section, Mandy is akin to legendary fantasy artist Frank Frazetta drinking a litre of LSD, watching The Evil Dead and Hellraiser while listening to Obscured by Clouds by Pink Floyd, then painting an epic cosmic triptych. Finally, they’ve constructed a film that not only can contain Nicolas Cage (as Werner Herzog termed it … “unleashing the hog”) but also work as a curious fusion of modern-day horror tropes, the operatic tone of Wagner’s Ring cycle and epically primal and elemental cosmic dread. It’s a doozy.

Opening with alarming statistics of the drug cartel violence that has besieged Mexico (160,000 dead and over 50,000 missing), Tigers are not Afraid layers magic realism against a gut-churningly bleak landscape of the orphaned children of the dead, roaming the ruined streets of an unnamed city run by human traffickers and the assorted scum that exist on the periphery of the drug cartel’s battleground.

Young teenager Estrella (Paola Lara) is alone, her mother murdered. Having no family or means of getting food, she meets the wiley Shine (Juan Ramón López), a young boy who leads a small gang of children (in a very deliberate Peter Pan and the Lost Boys reference) that he protects as they evade kidnappers who hunt them, intent on selling them into child-sex rings.

The youngest child in the group, 4-year-old Morro (Nery Arredondo), doesn’t speak because of the horrors he’s witnessed. Estrella becomes something of a ‘Wendy’ to the group, looking after the younger ones, while lamenting the loss of her own mother whom she ‘wishes’ back to life and whose zombie-like visage haunts Estrella, who begins to believe that her wishes are corrupted, always manifesting in dark and unexpected ways.

When Estrella finds local criminal Caco (Ianis Guerrero) dead in his home, she tells the group she did it to gain their trust. This results in the group being targeted by Caco’s associates and the children find themselves running scared.

Throughout the film, there are moments of tenderness and subtle beauty, with flourishes of magical creatures, inanimate objects coming to life as well as communicating with the dead, whose spirits exist amongst the living. The unrelenting bleakness does shift the tone into horror territory on a few occasions though the young cast are all terrifically capable and engaging and its strange and terrible beauty never once compromises or yields to the safety of tropes or cliché.

Much like Guillermo Del Toro’s Pan’s Labyrinth, in setting the fantasy world of these children’s imaginations against such a bitterly brutal reality, something else is created within the juxtaposition. It’s precisely the beauty this film finds in the unrelenting darkness of its subject matter that makes it so transcendent, so beautiful and so moving.

John (Anton Tennet) lives in the sleepy town of Thames, on New Zealand’s North Island. He’s got no family to lean back on nor prospects for his future, so bad decision-making has led him to the dead-end job of being muscle (or rather the subject of abuse and derision) for low-grade criminal-on-the-make, Shelton (Jonny Brugh from What We Do in the Shadows).

John is also poised to be evicted from his current home in his landlady’s garage, so he sees a make-or-break choice in front of him: grow some balls and take life by the horns, or be ordered around by the whinging, derisive Shelton for the rest of his days. Prompted into action by his feelings for Shelton’s younger sister, Kelly (Hetty Gaskell-Hahn), John decides to pull his own robbery of a Chinese general store. In the process, he scores a large bag of drug money and goes on the lam to evade the vengeful Shelton, who’s annoyed that his employee has gone freelance and sprouted ambitions of his own. So, John’s alone but he’s aided in no small part by a sweet score from the Chinese shop he just robbed: a bracelet that’s inhabited by an ancient Chinese demon allowing time-travel and the resultant creation of multiple versions of himself.

It’s New Zealand filmmaker Tim Van Dammen’s loving (and ingenious) treatment of the inherent time-travel genre tropes that reveal his inspirational sources. He’s fused the low-level suburban criminal bungling of dim-witted recidivists in films like Two Hands or Gettin’ Square with the time travel loop-back intricacy of Shane Carruth’s Primer or Nacho Vigalondo’s Timecrimes, allowing this low-budget comedy to break free of its budgetary limitations and lay a puzzle-box foundation on which to build its enjoyably silly and (at times) gorily slapstick laughs.

The setting itself (in the town of Thames) invokes the New Zealand sci-fi classic The Quiet Earth, which also famously filmed in the town (though at the time the joke was, if you needed to visualise the sudden evaporation of a town’s populace, downtown Thames on a Sunday morning is probably the closest you could get).

While Van Dammen does everything he can to keep things decidedly low-key despite the genre he’s playing in, editor Luke Haigh (Hunt for the Wilderpeople) and cinematographer Tim Flower (who shot Van Dammen’s previous film Romeo and Juliet: A Love Song) squeeze a lot out of the of the parochial small-town setting and its fantasy conceit, ensuring Van Dammen’s snappy, inventive tale is sure to see him graduate to bigger-budgeted sandboxes.

Tom Cruise has been a mainstay of the A-list for more than thirty years now. In that time, he’s worked with almost every major filmmaker. Steven Spielberg, Francis Coppola, Brian De Palma, Stanley Kubrick, Martin Scorsese, Ridley & Tony Scott, Oliver Stone, Paul Thomas Anderson, to name but a few. What this extended three-decade film school has afforded Cruise, is valuable lessons on screenwriting, editing and film structure/construction in general.  

Cruise took the reins of United Artists film studios back in 2006. That foray into studio management with his then-producing partner Paula Wagner (they were co-owners in a deal struck with MGM Studios) was largely unsuccessful.  Post 2005, after the 'Oprah couch jump' and subsequent split from Katie Holmes, he took his foot off the gas in regards to dramatic roles and focused more on genre: action and science-fiction (Oblivion, Edge of Tomorrow). Whether that’s because he believed that the ability of an audience to ‘buy’ him in a dramatic turn may have been detrimentally affected by the too-public persona wobbles (anyone remember Cruise opining over Brooke Shields taking anti-depressants?) is anyone's guess. That in itself is a very real phenomena, especially when actors become too well known due to negative public actions (cough 'Russell Crowe' Cough). When Cruise was unceremoniously dumped by Paramount Studio's owner (and real life Mr. Burns, Sumner Redstone) it was on the heels of a public statement from the ancient corporate cadaver (who was bitter at the less-than-stellar box office from Mission Impossible III, attributing it to Cruise's Scientology): "We don't think that someone who effectuates creative suicide and costs the company revenue should be on the lot...His recent conduct has not been acceptable to Paramount.")

Despite that fairly public embarrassment, Cruise ended up gravitating towards independent financing through Private Equity funds and Skydance, a production company owned by David Ellison, son of Oracle software magnate, Larry Ellison. 

Since then, Cruise has been focused on doing comedies (such as his brilliant turn as studio chief Les Grossman in Tropic Thunder) and primarily, on out-and-out action becoming something like Steve McQueen and Evel Knievel rolled into one. In a kind of strange reworking of a method actors process, he turns his action film-making into a personal challenge that only he can overcome.

Having worked with The Usual Suspects screenwriter Christopher McQuarrie on every one of his films shooting scripts since Valkyrie, Cruise insisted McQuarrie take the director’s chair on Mission Impossible: Rogue Nation, with the success of that collaboration leading to this follow up.

In Mission Impossible: Fallout, Ethan Hunt and the IMF team (Simon Pegg, Ving Rhames and Rebecca Ferguson all return) join forces with CIA assassin August Walker (Henry Cavill) to prevent a group of terrorists known as 'the Apostles' from using three plutonium cores for a nuclear attack on the Vatican, Jerusalem and Mecca. Of course there are MacGuffin's, Double MacGuffin's and Triple MacGuffin's galore. Things do tend to get very complicated, very quickly but Hunt and his desperate need to save those closest to him at all costs, gets tested to the limit.

McQuarrie and Cruise fly by the seat of their pants in production on the Mission Impossible films, embracing the chaos: the script is non-existent and scenes are written based around the locations and what needs to happen within the set pieces and stunts. Does it all come together? Hell yeah. There's a phenomenal HALO (High Altitude Low Open) jump that was pieced together from 106, 25,000 foot jumps conducted by Cruise and a cameraman, over a month in Dubai. A helicopter sequence, featuring Cruise in the pilots seat - alone - seeing him step-dive and corkscrew the craft, something that terrified even the hardened stunt crew. Cruise had never flown a helicopter and went to Airbus to learn. He qualified insanely fast, being trained by two different pilots working in a shift rotation, 16 hours a day, every day, for six weeks.  This kind of laser focused, death-wish fuelled insanity, affords the film a level of spectacle that the other films in the franchise have not really managed to attain (save for the burj khalifa dangling stunt at the end of MI4: Ghost Protocol). Well worth checking out.

With a cinematic presence that’s calculated to improve any film by at least 30% (no, I will not reveal my mathematical processes in arriving at that number), Dwayne ‘The Rock’ Johnson stars as ex-military Security expert Will Sawyer, tasked to sign off on the security systems viability of ‘The Pearl’, a gargantuan new addition to the Hong Kong skyline as well as being the tallest building ever constructed. As his wife Sarah (Neve Campbell) and his children are the only inhabitants of the residential section of the building, Sawyer travels around Hong Kong to secure the final details of the building’s security systems sign-off.

During this period, dodgy Euro-mercenaries infiltrate the building and, thinking it’s vacant, proceed with setting it alight. Their exact motives are unclear, though on the penthouse level of ‘The Pearl’, building owner and filthy rich magnate Zhao Long Ji (Chin Han) shields himself within impenetrable walls, holding a MacGuffin of such magnitude, that the Euro bad guys are willing to kill and burn anything they can, just to get to it. Cue The Rock who, desperate to gain access to the burning tower, commandeers a huge nearby crane, guiding it to the building’s upper floors, before using it as a makeshift platform upon which to leap into the building, to reunite with his beloved family and to break every bad guy into tiny, tiny pieces.

The Hong Kong setting (squarely aiming this at an international demographic) and Chinese co-leads make for an interesting diversion from the fact that Writer/Director Rawson Marshall Thurber (Central Intelligence, We're The Miller's, Dodgeball) has lifted every plot machination and trope from Die Hard and The Towering Inferno that he possibly can, infusing tech-gloss and by-the-numbers emotional beats into a fairly pedestrian genre blend. Ultimately, none of this matters once Dwayne Johnson rolls onto the screen, his winning charisma and (frankly disturbing) sincerity and intense likability means that every stupid plot twist and well-worn story beat is rendered irrelevant, as we the audience are forced to surrender to Johnson’s affable charms. Is it dumb? Yes. Is there a perverse fun to be had in watching Johnson open a can of whoop-ass on Euro scumbags with crap haircuts? Absolutely. 

Most Marvel Studio films of recent years have been aimed at older audiences, so it’s a refreshing thing then that the follow up to 2015’s Ant Man is a relatively young-audience-friendly romp. Once again, Paul Rudd stars as ex-con Scott Lang, the associate of scientist, techno whizz (and original Ant-Man) Hank Pym (Michael Douglas). In the previous Ant-Man appearance in Captain America: Civil War, Scott Lang was apprehended after a super-powered punch-up at a Berlin Airport. When Ant-Man and The Wasp opens, we find Scott days from the end of his sentence, wearing an ankle-bracelet and living under house-arrest as he prepares to ‘go legit’ and expand the operations of the security company he’s founded with his former prison mate, Luis (Michael Peña). He’s contacted by Hank Pym (Michael Douglas) and his daughter Hope Van Dyne (Evangeline Lilley) and they reveal they’ve got a plan to delve back into the farthest reaches of the Quantum Realm (visited by Scott Lang in the last film) and attempt to rescue Hank’s wife and Hope’s mother: Janet Van Dyne (Michelle Pfeiffer).

Set prior to the events of Avengers: Infinity War, Ant-Man and The Wasp is content to occupy less challenging (and far less grim) territory than the previous Avenger's film, deploying a smaller focus (pun intended) and setting its events solely within the city of San Francisco. There’s plenty of thrills and action with the addition of dual villains:  Ava (Hannah John-Kamen) a young woman with ‘phasing’ abilities who can move through physical objects and calls herself ‘Ghost’ and tech-crim Sonny Burch (Walton Goggins) who endlessly tracks Hank Pym’s miniaturised (and suitcase-sized) lab, in order to steal the sweet tech that lies within it, so he can sell it on the black market.

Despite the baggy set-up and a few plotting missteps, this is still a hugely enjoyable sequel and surprises with just how much fun it is. Peyton Reed - who helmed the first film - proves to be capable hands as director on this outing, deftly executing some seriously inventive and clever ‘small-to-large and large-to-small’ visual gags during the many action sequences. Evangeline Lilley all but walks away with the ‘ass-kicking superhero’ trophy as The Wasp, with Rudd serving primarily as her foil and providing the wise-cracks. Most appealingly though is how kid-friendly it is, with a majority of superhero flicks being prohibitively adult-oriented these days, it’s a welcome and refreshing change to sit with your young child and enjoy an entry into the Marvel money-verse that’s keen to entertain and (with the exception of the Thanos-referencing post-credit sting) focus primarily on the giggles.