Michael Peña has a showstopper of a scene in “Ant-Man and the Wasp.”
In 2015’s Ant-Man, Michael Peña steals a couple of sections of the film when his character, Luis, is asked to recount a story, and Luis has a very unusual and detailed way of doing this. Here’s an example from the first film.
For the sequel, director Peyton Reed — who we interviewed earlier this week — decided they wanted to do a callback to those scenes, but it couldn’t just be in there as a way of patting themselves on the back for a job well done in the first movie.
As Reed told Uproxx, “We obviously had a lot of conversations about do we want to do that concept again? We did, but we didn’t want to be like, ‘Hey, man, this is so awesome in the first movie, here it is again.’ We didn’t want to be so pleased with ourselves about it.”
[Minor spoilers ahead.]
It’s about halfway through the movie and it’s kind of surprising we hadn’t seen Luis go into one of these montages yet, which has a certain way of building the anticipation. As a viewer, you know it’s coming in some shape or form, but the longer we wait, the greater the scene plays. It’s kind of like a cinematic version of waiting for “Born to Run” at a concert.
Reed continues, “So if we were going to do it again, it needed to have another angle to it. It couldn’t just be a tip montage, getting tips.”
So instead of tips, Luis, Dave (T. I.) and Kurt (David Dastmalchian) – formerly known as Scott Lang’s former partners in crime and now business partners – have all been kidnapped by Walter Goggin’s sort of low rent crime boss, Sonny Burch. Burch and his crew inject Luis with truth serum (there’s big debate about if truth serum is a real thing or not) and then Luis is off to the races, telling a visibly annoyed Goggins everything that has happened to that point in hilarious fashion. It’s a showstopper of a scene and you can watch a portion of it below. (It’s longer and different in the film.)
“So, the version that we did and the other elements we introduced to it felt like, oh, okay, this could be a good new wrinkle and this could be really, really fun,” says Reed. “And, of course, Michael knocked it out of the park. So, yeah, that’s one of my favorite sequences.”
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