In this Sunday, June 24, 2018 photo, Actress Evangeline Lilly poses for a portrait during press day for "Ant-Man and The Wasp" at The Langham Huntington in Pasadena, Calif. Lilly plays The Wasp, the first... (Associated Press) 
 
 LOS ANGELES (AP) — The "Ant-Man" sequel may be about tiny superheroes, but the film is making a big statement about female empowerment by featuring Evangeline Lilly's The Wasp not only in the title, but giving her a larger stake in Marvel's sprawling movie franchise. 
 
 "Ant-Man and The Wasp," the 20th film in the Marvel cinematic universe that includes "Black Panther," ''Iron Man" and "Avengers: Infinity War," is the first one in the series to include a female character in a title role. The prominence of The Wasp, a character who has major roles in the "Ant-Man" and "Avengers" comic books, comes after years of fan anticipation for a female Marvel superhero to get her own film. Scarlett Johansson has expressed her desire to see her character, Black Widow, get a standalone film, but Marvel Studios has kept her primarily in its marquee "Avengers" films. 
 
 "You know, I've asked myself the same question: Are we making a mountain out of a molehill?" Lilly said during a recent interview when asked about being featured in a Marvel film's title. She said after considering it more closely, "'No, actually, this is kind of a big deal, and this is about time.'" 
 
 The film is the sequel to 2015's "Ant-Man," which introduced Paul Rudd as a thief enlisted by Michael Douglas' Hank Pym to become a do-gooder. The original earned more than $180 million in North America and $500 million at the global box office. The sequel is the third Marvel Films release this year, but it largely steers clear of the developments in the blockbuster "Avengers: Infinity War." 
 
 The Wasp was a comic book favorite of director Peyton Reed, who teased her appearance in future Marvel films with a cameo of her supersuit at the end of "Ant-Man." 
 
 He said it was important that The Wasp be a fully-formed hero and not bound by stereotypes. 
 
 "I worked really closely with Evangeline, and we talked about, 'Now we're going to have a chance to make a fully formed hero, and we want her to be as dimensional as possible. And we don't want her to be a hero who is always glammed up with hair and makeup. We wanted her to be a little sweaty. And we want her, like, when that helmet comes off, her hair is in a ponytail, because that's the practical thing you would do,'" Reed said. 
 
 Lilly's role isn't the only prominent female character in the film. Hannah John-Kamen plays Ghost, a villain bent on sowing discord among powerful institutions, in a role that was initially written for a man. 
 
 "It's amazing, as a female, to play such a strong character ... so that people can look up to that and see that, 'Yeah, this is a progression,'" said John-Kamen, who is in her biggest role yet after starring in the Canadian sci-fi series "Killjoys" and having small roles in "Ready Player One" and "Tomb Raider." 
 
 "There is so much more going on in this film that represents female energy, that represents female stories, that represents female struggle and that represents female power," Lilly said. "In this film, I'm very proud to say I recognize authentic female power in that it's powerful to be vulnerable, it's powerful to be elegant, it's powerful to be graceful and nurturing and kind and forgiving and compassionate and generous ... things that tend to be typically categorized as weaknesses." 
 
 Marvel's first film based solely on a female superhero will be the 1990s' set "Captain Marvel," which stars Brie Larson in the title role and is slated for release next year. 
 
 "Ant-Man and The Wasp" is the first Marvel film to be released after April's "Infinity War," which upended the franchise and set up a fourth "Avengers" film that will be released next summer. 
 
 The "Ant-Man and The Wasp" cast are keeping any secrets about that film closely guarded. During a recent interview, Rudd started to answer a question about his character's role going forward in Marvels films. "A funny story, because, you know, in 'Avengers 4,'" he said, before pretending to be hit in the neck with a dart and falling out of his chair. 
 
 Douglas said before his first Comic-Con panel about the original "Ant-Man," he underwent secrecy tests — and thought he might have to give blood — to prove that he could keep from spoiling that film's secrets. While he thought it was a bit much at the time, Douglas said he's grown to appreciate what Marvel Films has done and the care they take to avoid spoilers for fans. 
 
 "Marvel has done this amazing job of creating buzz just for people not knowing what exactly is going to happen," Douglas said. 
 
 "We do not want to spoil things for people. There are people out there hired to try and find things out," Rudd said. "It's an amazing, intense thing to be a part of." ||||| The sequel has the same director, Peyton Reed, although it might as well have a new one. (The screenwriters are Mr. Rudd, Chris McKenna, Erik Sommers, Andrew Barrer and Gabriel Ferrari.) Like everyone else who has returned for duty, Mr. Reed seems vastly happier to be here than he did last time around, perhaps because he is no longer burdened with having to introduce a Marvel movie brand or has managed to loosen the corporate yoke. Whatever got his juices flowing, Mr. Reed, a comedy veteran (“Bring It On”), handles the new, fairly unencumbered material with a generally light touch, so that for once a Marvel movie feels shorter than its running time (in this case 118 minutes). 
 
 That lightness extends through “Ant-Man and the Wasp,” affecting not just what the characters say and do but how they interact. In too many superhero movies and especially sequels, characters don’t as much talk to one another as advance the story in between big blocks of action. One kablooey leads to another, and every so often, as if to remind us of the pretty faces that go with the suits, the superheroes huddle. They plot and they quip and then it’s just bang, boom, repeat. The assumption seems to be that because the audience knows the franchise there’s no need to incorporate anything meaningful — anything like life — that might distinguish or deepen its characters. ||||| Close Get email notifications on Calvin Wilson daily! 
 
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 Email notifications are only sent once a day, and only if there are new matching items. ||||| A still from the "Ant-Man and the Wasp" trailer depicts an expanding building on the Embarcadero near Pier 39. 
 
 A still from the "Ant-Man and the Wasp" trailer depicts Ant-Man Scott Lang stopping a car. Although the film takes place in San Francisco, this scene was shot in Atlanta, Georgia. 
 
 A still from the "Ant-Man and the Wasp" trailer depicts Ant-Man Scott Lang on a car turning from Bush Street. 
 
 A still from the "Ant-Man and the Wasp" trailer depicts Ant-Man Scott Lang stopping a car. Although the film takes place in San Francisco, this scene was shot in Georgia. 
 
 A still from the "Ant-Man and the Wasp" trailer depicts Ant-Man Scott Lang (Rudd) in the San Francisco Bay. 
 
 Paul Rudd is Ant-Man in the sequel “Ant-Man and The Wasp,” which once again offers some nice San Francisco scenes. 
 
 When we first see Scott Lang, a.k.a. Ant-Man, in “Ant-Man and the Wasp,” he is crawling on all fours with his daughter Cassie through a maze of cardboard boxes in an Indiana Jones-like adventure, complete with tunnels, Silly String cobwebs, cardboard skeletons and painted string lasers in a quest for buried treasure — an old, cheap trophy. 
 
 Escape means a roller-coaster finish, and with this delightful sequence achieved without the aid of computer effects, this “Ant-Man” entry stakes out its own corner of the Marvel Universe sandbox as a throwback to ’80s-style childlike adventure. 
 
 Not that there aren’t plenty of impressive modern action sequences made up of X’s and O’s. In almost every way, “Ant-Man and the Wasp” outdoes its 2015 original. Paul Rudd, again a co-writer, is more comfortable as Ant-Man, bending this series to his affable will. It makes better use of San Francisco, where the movie is set and partially shot — Lombard Street lends a nifty assist in one action sequence. Hope (Evangeline Lilly), Scott’s love interest, actually gets to do something this time besides root from the sidelines — she’s the Wasp, and she’s excellent. 
 
 And it has added Michelle Pfeiffer and Laurence Fishburne, always good ideas. 
 
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 The movie begins with Dr. Hank Pym (Michael Douglas) reigniting his quest to reach the Quantum Realm. Back in the ’80s, Pym was Ant-Man, and his wife, Janet (Pfeiffer), was the Wasp; they saved the world from nuclear disaster, but Janet was sucked into the Quantum Realm — where you get atomically small, and time and space are different. 
 
 Meanwhile, Scott is serving two years of house arrest in his modest San Francisco home for crimes committed while helping out in “Captain America: Civil War” (2016). Home confinement has made Scott regress even more deeply into his inner child (dovetailing neatly with Rudd’s comedic persona) — he whiles away the days singing karaoke, pounding on an electronic drum set, watching TV and spending quality time with Cassie (Abby Ryder Fortson). 
 
 Scott has a dream that he is back in the Quantum Realm, which he briefly visited at the end of “Ant-Man.” This time, he is contacted by Janet, who is apparently alive after 30 years. Hope and Pym kidnap Scott to help them work on bringing Janet back. 
 
 Pym has constructed a huge, multistory laboratory (which collapses into convenient travel size when needed — the ultimate San Francisco pop-up), to attempt to build a tunnel to the Quantum Realm. Complications arise when their lab is targeted by a shady businessman (Walter Goggins, also the villain in “Tomb Raider” this year), and Pym’s new technology is coveted by a ghostlike woman, Eva (Hannah John-Kamen, “Game of Thrones”), who teams with Berkeley professor Bill Foster (Fishburne), a former colleague of Pym’s. 
 
 As always, Scott can count on help from his pals, led by Luis (Michael Peña, hilarious again). 
 
 The plot and situations veer from way cool to infantile — but isn’t it always that way with superhero movies, even those with the cultural importance of “Wonder Woman” and “Black Panther”? Each film reaches its own saturation point, but the end point is not as important as the journey. 
 
 To that end, returning director Peyton Reed keeps things loose and breezy. Known mostly for comedies (the “Ant-Man” movies are his first feature films since the Jim Carrey comedy “Yes Man” in 2008), he seems the right choice for a section of the Marvel Universe that veers toward parody of these ridiculous — but often ridiculously entertaining — films. 
 
 How seriously can you take a movie where weapons include a huge salt shaker and giant Pez dispenser? They feature in an inventive action sequence that adds to the rich history of San Francisco car-chase sequences — this evokes the one in the Dirty Harry movie “The Dead Pool,” a sequence that itself was a parody of the classic chase in “Bullitt.” 
 
 “Ant-Man and the Wasp” is best appreciated from Cassie’s wide-eyed worldview. She clearly won the cool-dad lottery. 
 
 G. Allen Johnson is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. Email: ajohnson@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @BRfilmsAllen 
 
 More Information Ant-Man and the Wasp Action. Starring Paul Rudd, Evangeline Lilly, Michael Peña, Michael Douglas, Michelle Pfeiffer. Directed by Peyton Reed. (PG-13. 125 minutes.) ||||| This image released by Marvel Studios shows Evangeline Lilly and Michael Douglas in a scene from "Ant-Man and the Wasp." (Disney/Marvel Studios via AP) (Associated Press) 
 
 Not since Animal against the advice of Dr. Bunsen Honeydew and Beaker ingested Insta-Growth pills has a movie had as much fun with scale as "Ant-Man and The Wasp." 
 
 Among the greatest threats to the shape-shifting heroes of the Marvel sequel are windshield wipers, salt shakers and seagulls. This is surely the first movie to weaponize that most fearsome of terrors: a giant Hello Kitty Pez dispenser. In one of the film's finest moments, a loud, careening chase culminates in a dramatic fall into the ocean sounded not with an explosive splash but with a tiny ripple and a "Plink!" 
 
 In both scale and ambition, "Ant-Man and The Wasp" is an altogether more modest affair, and it's so much the better for it. Most Marvel movies strenuously insist on how much they matter — how much a carefully stitched together comic-book apparatus hangs in the balance — with only an occasional aside to acknowledge their inherent silliness. But slapstick is in the DNA of "Ant-Man and The Wasp." 
 
 For some Marvel devotees, "Ant-Man and The Wasp" will be a clever enough diversion in between the more main-event releases. But it's pretty much exactly what I'd want in a superhero movie: a funny cast, zippy action scenes and not an infinity stone in sight. 
 
 The Marvel product has, it should be noted, grown more dynamic and varied in recent years. But if you're not going to reach the mythic heights of "Black Panther," the light-hearted antics of "Ant-Man and The Wasp" are your next-best bet. As different as they are, the two films have one crucial thing in common: No outer space. 
 
 Just as "Black Panther" styled itself after a spy thriller, "Ant-Man" takes from the heist movie. The first installment in 2015 was a somewhat muddled franchise debut, thanks to a late director shuffle. Peyton Reed, who took over production on the first one, is back here, and he has carved out a real identity for Paul Rudd's character, among the most self-contained in Marvel's "cinematic universe." 
 
 And more than its predecessor, "Ant-Man and The Wasp" has adopted the goofball charm of its leading man. Coming a few years after "Ant-Man," Rudd's Scott Lang is now under house arrest for his involvement in the Berlin showdown of "Captain America: Civil War." When his 10-year-old daughter Cassie (Abby Ryder Fortson) isn't around, he passes the time playing drums and learning magic tricks. With just days to go before Randall Park's S.H.I.E.L.D. agent is to remove Lang's monitoring device, he's summoned by the brains behind their last adventure: Dr. Hank Pym (a sometimes in-the-way Michael Douglas) and Pym's daughter Hope van Dyne (Evangeline Lilly), whose winged Ant-Man-like suit has earned her the Wasp moniker. 
 
 Pym believes his wife, Janet (Michelle Pfeiffer) has for the last 30 years been locked away in the "quantum realm," a mind- and matter-bending subatomic limbo that, it turns out, has predictably done curiously little damage to the indestructible Pfeiffer. A Technicolor blur of floating blobs, the quantum realm looks like a lava lamp's dream of heaven. 
 
 To send someone into the realm on a rescue mission, Pym and Van Dyne have built a sophisticated laboratory many stories high that, with a click of a remote, they can shrink down to carry-on size. Their plans bring them into contact with a black-market dealer (Walton Goggins) and an old academic colleague of Pym's (Laurence Fishburne). It also attracts the interest of the film's villain, Ghost (Hannah John-Kamen), whose tragic backstory has left her burning (figuratively) and blurry (literally) with anger for being robbed of a bodily existence. 
 
 The plot is fine but many of the pleasures of "Ant-Man and The Wasp" come from its digressions. And no one better breaks down the molecular structure of a Marvel movie than Michael Pena. Every time he takes the screen, he threatens to destabilize it with his chatterbox excitement. When Pena's Luis (Lang's friend and business partner at X-Con Security) is given a truth serum, you pray for the movie to just let him keep talking until the end credits roll. Just as good is Park, who steals his scenes with a quieter deadpan. 
 
 There are more gags, too. A malfunctioning Ant-Man suit turns Rudd enormous or embarrassingly child-sized. A Hot Wheels-riff on the "Bullitt" car chase tumbles down the hills of San Francisco. None of this is earth-shattering stuff, but that's part of the fun of it. Here, for once, is a Marvel movie about saving one life, not a billion. 
 
 "Ant-Man and the Wasp," a Walt Disney Studios release, is rated PG-13 by the Motion Picture Association of America for "some sci-fi action violence." Running time: 118 minutes. Three stars out of four. 
 
 ___ 
 
 Follow Jake Coyle on Twitter at: http://twitter.com/jakecoyleAP
– A size-adjustable superhero finds trouble and a partner in Marvel's Ant-Man and the Wasp, so far much better received than its predecessor. The film from director Peyton Reed features Paul Rudd and Evangeline Lilly (Kate, from Lost) in the titles roles—a first for a female Marvel character. As of Friday, the movie had an 87% rating from critics on Rotten Tomatoes. Samples: It's "an engaging goof that resists bludgeoning you with bigness and instead settles for good vibes and jokes," writes Manohla Dargis at the New York Times, giving much credit to Reed. He "persuasively embraces the story's Alice in Wonderland weirdness" and "handles the new, fairly unencumbered material with a generally light touch, so that for once a Marvel movie feels shorter than its running time," she writes. Calvin Wilson calls the film "one of the most entertaining releases from Marvel Studios" and "a vast improvement" over 2015's Ant-Man. "Reed deftly balances action and comedy with special effects that are impressive but not overwhelming," while Rudd's "everyman appeal seldom has been put to such brilliant use," Wilson writes at the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. He also commends "scene-stealer" Michael Pena. Lilly as Hope, aka the Wasp, impresses, too. In this sequel, she "actually gets to do something this time besides root from the sidelines … and she's excellent," G. Allen Johnson writes at the San Francisco Chronicle. But it's the "loose and breezy" feel and "spirit of childlike fun" that dominate the film, appropriately. After all, "how seriously can you take a movie where weapons include a huge salt shaker and giant Pez dispenser?" "If you're not going to reach the mythic heights of Black Panther, the light-hearted antics of Ant-Man and the Wasp are your next-best bet," as Jake Coyle puts it at the AP. Having "adopted the goofball charm of its leading man," the film is "pretty much exactly what I'd want in a superhero movie: a funny cast, zippy action scenes and not an infinity stone in sight."