SPOILER WARNING: The following article contains spoilers for Ant-Man And The Wasp. If you have not yet seen the film, and don't wish to know major, important details about the ending, please bookmark this page and come back after your screening!
Peyton Reed's Ant-Man And The Wasp is a film ultimately ripe with comedic premises -- from the nature of the ensemble of wacky heroes, to the funny applications of the unique power sets -- but one unexpected moment even allows for a bit of body swapping humor. Janet Van Dyne (Michelle Pfeiffer) makes an attempt to reach out to her husband (Michael Douglas) and daughter (Evangeline Lilly) from the Quantum Realm, and the way she does it is by essentially possessing Scott Lang (Paul Rudd). It makes for a hilarious sequence, and it's one that I recently had the opportunity to ask the star about:
Late last month I took part in the domestic press day for Ant-Man And The Wasp in Pasadena, California, and during my interview with Paul Rudd I took the opportunity to ask about the scene where Scott Lang "channels" Janet. The actor smiled recounting the sequence, and acknowledged that the idea was kind of a "big swing" for the production, given that the silliness could have potentially undercut the emotionality. Still, he clearly had a lot of fun filming it on set with Michael Douglas and Evangeline Lilly, and revealed that they internally referred to it as the "All Of Me Scene" (a reference to the 1984 Carl Reiner comedy that has a character played by Steve Martin essentially possessed by the soul of the character played by Lily Tomlin).
The scene being discussed here is certainly one of the most inherently broad comedic sequences that we've seen in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, but it should be recognized that the larger tone of Ant-Man And The Wasp legitimizes it and makes it work. The blockbuster was specifically designed as a breath-of-fresh-air comedy after the hyper, large-scale drama featured in Avengers: Infinity War, and as a result a key moment where Scott Lang channels Janet Van Dyne very much fits in with the larger oeuvre. Like much of the film, it gets a hearty laugh (especially at the very end when Scott realizes that he's holding Hank Pym's hand), but it also drives the story forward to its exciting finale.
Ant-Man and the Wasp , which also stars Lawrence Fishburne, Hannah John-Kamen, Walton Goggins, Randall Park, Michael Pena, and more, is now in theaters everywhere nationwide, and this is far from the end of our coverage. We have plenty more features and stories coming your way in the next few days, so be sure to stay tuned here on CinemaBlend.
