Ant-Man"s Agent Woo: do superhero films have a sidekick race problem?
As the comic-book movie machine churns on, spinning myriad variations on a limited set of themes, similarities are bound to emerge. Watching the new Ant-Man and the Wasp brought home a fresh one to me: the civilian sidekick. This is the character who’s a loyal friend of the hero but possesses no superpowers of their own. They often wish they did, but you know they never will. Their ordinariness and incomprehension is there to throw the superhero’s transformation into comic relief. Paul Rudd’s Scott Lang, AKA Ant-Man, has Luis as his civilian sidekick. If you remember the first movie, Luis, played by Michael Peña, is Lang’s former cellmate and literal partner in crime. He’s Hispanic, good-natured and often hilarious, even when he’s informing Ant-Man that his mum died and his dad got deported. Luis is constantly asking if he can try on the suit, or get one of his own. It’ll never happen, but he can still console himself with being the funni...