Starring: Paul Rudd, Michael Douglas, Evangeline Lilly, Michael Pena, David Dastmalchian, Tip ‘T.I.’ Harris, Wood Harris, Hayley Atwell, John Slattery, Martin Donovan, Garrett Morris and Corey Stoll.
After over a decade of start-stops, and one year following dreams of comic book enthusiasts everywhere getting smashed with the announcement of longtime Ant-Man character fan Edgar Wright leaving the project, Ant-Man, the film about a suit able to render its wearer the size of a peanut M & M, is finally upon us. One thing Marvel Studios and replacement director Peyton Reed need to adapt to is even if their resulting film pleases the masses, the film geeks they are trying so hard to please will inevitably wonder how Wright’s vision could have improved the end result. There was something genuinely intriguing to me about making the last film in Phase 2 of the Marvel Cinematic Universe into an intimate comedic character piece as opposed to yet another catastrophic global danger/destruction porn piece. Though it can be argued that the world’s in danger’ dial was already at its limit after Joss Whedon’s Avengers: The Age of Ultron from earlier this year.
Armed with a likable lead and endearing overall story, Ant-Man works in bunches. The original heist film concept Wright and his writing partner Joe Cornish (who both retain story and screenplay credit) came up with is better realized than you’d expect. Especially considering the vision was taken over by the director of Bring It On. Comic book purists know that Hank Pym (Douglas) is the actual original member of The Avengers and Scott Lange (Rudd) ends up eventually taking the torch that Pym passes to him. Here, the story starts us off in a flashback to 1989, when Pym originally comes up with the Pym Particle. He then makes the by now cliche proclamation that nobody will ever get the formula as long as he lives. Yeah. Right. Of note in this section of Ant-Man is the incredible CGI job done on Douglas, as he looks like he stepped directly from the set of 1988’s Wall Street onto this one. Combined with the similar success of doing the same to Arnold Schwarzenegger in Terminator Genisys, I’d say CGI artists are 97% to seamless realism, as opposed to the distraction it was in, say, 2006’s X-Men: The Last Stand. The film has a modest (in Marvel standards) $130 million budget, and I would venture to say at least a third of that went to getting this de-aging job just right.
Flash forward to modern day. Pym is now a has been losing hold of his company after his former protege Darren Cross (Stoll) metaphorically pushes him out. On the personal end, Pym’s daughter Hope (Lilly) does not have the best relationship with her father and this relationship gets even more strained when Hank decides to turn his attention to down on his luck, former prisoner Lange instead of working on being a father to his real daughter. At the same time, Lange is fired from Baskin Robbins and gets kicked out of a party for his daughter by his ex wife (Greer) and her new beau (Canavale). This line of parallelism between the two father-daughter relationships could have seemed clunky. Though he will never be mistaken for Spielberg, Reed makes it work without getting too sappy.
Though the villain in Ant-Man is better than most Marvel bad guy incarnations, Cross (Stoll) is still one twirl of the mustache away from being cliche. He certainly has some nice moments (the final battle, which consists of changing toys and bugs into different proportions, is a stand-out), but overall I just did not fear nor endear myself to him. Say what you will about Ultron. At least I was in constant fear of what he would do next. Here, Cross makes proclamations to ‘end war as we know it,’ but doesn’t get much more than a blink of an eye and a hand to my yawning mouth each time he did. The fact that Ant-Man is not about the title character as much as Cross’s relationship with his former mentor is a real fault of the movie.
With the villain a non factor of enjoyment, Ant-Man‘s success with me lie in how successful Rudd was at channeling his inner Downey and making the role of Lange his own. No matter what I think of the rest of the film, Rudd (who worked with Reed on Yes, Man) is fantastic, and Marvel could not have picked a better star to fill Ant-Man’s little shoes. The comedy that revolved around Rudd worked for me, though I cannot say the same thing about Pena. While I can certainly see Pena being a standout to most people, I did not laugh at nor like his scenes -specifically his in synch with the action monologues- at all. It almost reminded me of Guardians of the Galaxy in the way that I can see how most people could like him. It just did not fit in with what I feel works from a successful comedic standpoint.
I don’t want to act like I did not enjoy Ant-Man, because in some ways I did. One thing a comic book movie brought down to this intimate a scale does is force writers to work more on characterization than how the villain is going to take out the world. This is where Ant-Man is most successful, as the smallness of the character hides just how big an overall heart the film really has. Nothing about the warmness of feelings these characters had felt manufactured, and the way Rudd plays off all of it is what makes it work. Also, while Pena gets most of the big lines, Dastmalchian is the second hand character who works the best and was a major highlight for me.
Don’t let all the character moments I am describing make you assume Ant-Man is nothing more than a rom-com in disguise. The action in the film comes in strides and hops instead of sprints and leaps, and those who come to Marvel films expecting nothing less than city wide destruction will be disappointed to know the de-porn in Ant-Man is limited to a house. Still, seeing how the suit works is what makes the film’s later action scenes pay off as well as they do, and Reed fills these scenes with items you would not think of as being dangerous. There are great sections involving bath tubs and Thomas The Tank Engine (not kidding) which make any sort of danger Cross brings seem almost microscopic.
I guess that’s my main problem with Ant-Man. As much as I tired of seeing Bad Guy 1 try and out destruct Bad Guy 2 in films past, there was always a sort of scope and danger knowing anything was possible within them. By making Ant-Man a more intimate film, Marvel has painted themselves into a corner, as they have to rely on comedy and drama to move the story forward. As much as I enjoyed the effort, when both of those means of storytelling don’t work, they are going to have problems like this.
6 out of 10