Peyton Reed is a tidy studio comedian whose best idea arrived with the first two Ant-Man films: a hero whose whole joke is being the wrong size. When the studio made everything enormous the joke went, and what was left was competence.
Fi1m perspective
A fight on a toy train set is the clearest picture of what Peyton Reed does well. Two men hitting each other in earnest on something small, the camera placed so we see the seriousness and the silliness in the same shot. Reed has said he wants the camera "not just having a camera sit there and record someone being funny, but really being complicit in the comedy", and at his best it is: the gag lives in where the camera stands and how big the thing in front of it turns out to be.
He came up through television and music videos, and his first feature, Bring It On (2000), opened a decade of studio comedies: Down with Love (2003), a pastiche of the 1960s sex comedy with the sets and colours to match, then The Break-Up (2006) and Yes Man (2008). They are neat films. Yes Man gets forty good minutes out of Jim Carrey agreeing to everything and then turns into the romantic comedy it was always going to be; Andrew Laws builds Carl a convincingly beige bank and flat, and the film keeps going back to them when it should be somewhere new. Rhys Darby walks off with it. Reed directs it dutifully, and dutiful is the word for most of this period. The frame is tidy, the jokes land where they are placed, and nothing in it seems to have surprised anyone who made it.
In 2015 he took over Ant-Man after Edgar Wright left it, and for once the material suited him. A heist, a suburban house, a hero whose power is a change of scale: the set pieces could be built around the gap between how serious a fight looks and how small it is, and Paul Rudd and Evangeline Lilly, who have made all three films with him, play it straight enough for the gap to show. Those were the small ones, and they were the ones people liked.
Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania (2023) throws that away. Scott Lang and his family spend most of its 125 minutes in the Quantum Realm, and everything is enormous: the cities, the armies, the villain, the stakes. When everything on screen is already the wrong size there is no wrong size left to be, and Reed's one reliable trick has nothing to push against. We spent the last hour of it wanting the train set back, because the fight on it had a shape and this had haze. Jonathan Majors, patient in a part that could have been all shouting, and Michelle Pfeiffer keep it from being a write-off. It is the loudest of his three Marvel films and the least distinctive.
He has since directed episodes of The Mandalorian, which is a safe pair of hands doing safe-pair-of-hands work. His best idea is a small thing treated seriously. The next film should be small enough for the camera to see the joke.
Biography
Peyton Tucker Reed (born 3 July 1964) is an American film and television director. He was born in Raleigh, North Carolina, and graduated from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in 1987 with a degree in English and Radio, Television & Motion Pictures.
Reed's feature directorial debut was the comedy Bring It On (2000). He went on to direct Down with Love (2003), The Break-Up (2006) and Yes Man (2008). In 2015 he replaced Edgar Wright as director of Ant-Man, and subsequently helmed its sequels Ant-Man and the Wasp (2018) and Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania (2023). He has also directed episodes of the television series The Mandalorian (2019).
