Movie Review: Ant-Man
What We Liked
What We Didn't Like
The summer isn’t over yet, there’s still time for more Marvel action. As if the second Avengers movie wasn’t enough, we now have another entry into the Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU) entitled Ant-Man. Don’t worry. You may not have ever heard of him. It’s understandable. Don’t feel bad about it.
The film was written, and re-written, by Edgar Wright, Joe Cornish, Adam McKay, and Paul Rudd. The film was originally meant to be a writer/director venue, a la Joss Whedon or James Gunn, but Wright suffered from the dread disease called “creative differences” with the studio. The film was then handed over to Peyton Reed who has a varied television career up to this point and who was nearly selected for the slot of director for Thor 2: Dark World, if internet rumors can be believed.
Ant-Man is the story of Scott Lang (Paul Rudd) becoming the Ant-Man and taking up the mantle from the original Ant-Man, and the inventor of the super-shrinking suit and technology, Dr. Hank Pym (Michael Douglas).
The story opens with a flashback to the days when Howard Stark (John Slattery) is running S.H.I.E.L.D. At his side are Peggy Carter (Hayley Atwell) and Mitchell Carson (Martin Donovan). They all conflict with Dr. Hank Pym because he does not want to share his technology with S.H.I.E.L.D. because he feels it is far too dangerous to trust to them or anyone else with it.
The story then moves to the present day with Scott Lang getting released from prison and picked up by his former cellmate Luis (Michael Pena). We are soon given a bit of Scott’s backstory in the form of Luis selling up Scott to his buddies/fellow criminals. They are Kurt (David Dastmalchian) the hacker and Dave (T.I.) the wheelman. They would love to get Scott involved in their next criminal exploit. Luis expounds on Scott’s awesome hacktivist burglary of his former employer, when he tried to blow the whistle on them for ripping off the public, and how it ended up a the public shaming and downfall of the company and unfortunately three years in prison for him.
Scott wants nothing to do with the other criminals’ plans and only seeks to reconnect with his young daughter Cassie (Abby Ryder Fortson) who he misses dearly. That puts him in contention with his ex-wife, Maggie (Judy Greer), and her new fiancé Paxton (Bobby Cannavale). Paxton is a police detective, so you can imagine how thrilled he is to see the ex-con ex-husband show up at his house. Hilarity ensues even with the emotional friction of the predictably tense situation.
Now we all know the story revolves around a heist simply from the trailers about the film. So in short order, Scott is soon out of options and is forced to attempt to lead a burglary with the F-Troop of ex-cons. Luis and company perform admirably, and Scott pulls off the job with great ingenuity. Problem is there is not a jackpot at the end of the crime-ridden rainbow. They find something much more valuable than dollar bills in the safe.
From this point on we are introduced to the daughter of Dr Pym, Hope Van Dyne (Evangeline Lily), and his former protégé, Darren Cross (Corey Stoller). Hope works for Cross now and is none too pleased with her father for several reasons that soon become apparent. Cross will later become Yellowjacket and do battle with Ant-Man.
Ultimately the story is about the father-daughter relationships. The Scott-Maggie and Hank-Hope relationships are what are most meaningful in the film. They are not pulled off to perfection here but are not done too badly either. It’s hard to resist a little girl being gaga over her father and missing him desperately. That was well done. The Hank-Hope interplay is a little less polished. Some of the weaker writing efforts went into this element of the film and their decades’ long issues get resolved a bit too handily.
The film really shines in the action pieces such as the training montage section, where Scott must learn to use the Ant-Man suit, and borrows heavily from a similar sequence in Iron Man (2008) while at the same time taking its own very funny spin on this required story element. Speaking of funny I have to say the whole cast did a great job with the lighter tone in this film over some of the other Marvel films [with the obvious exception being Guardians of the Galaxy (2014) of course)]. Pena was goofy. Rudd was wry. The film was great fun all around.
The action itself was very enjoyable as the shrinking shots and battle scenes were awesome, funny and well crafted. I had concerns about Rudd as an action star, not anymore. Overall, Ant-Man was a bit more choppy than I would have liked and seemed to suffer from re-write issues here and there but is truly an enormously fun, popcorn ride of a film.
Steven Gahm
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