By John Gholson
Get ready, Scott Lang fans – your time has arrived! Okay, sit down. Both of you.
Truth is, I am of two minds about Ant-Man. On the one hand, it is noticeably similar to Iron Man, with its tale of a scientist (Michael Douglas as Hank Pym) who uses his technology for part-time superheroics, fighting against the controlling interests (Corey Stoll as Darren Cross) at the company he founded, who would sell his tech to the highest bidder within the military industrial complex. Unlike Iron Man, Ant-Man is too often inert, stuffed with exposition and far more talking than doing. If you wanted your Marvel movies to feel smaller, well, here’s one.
But for some brief, and truly glorious moments, Ant-Man really comes alive. The shrinking effects are wonderfully realized by director Peyton Reed, along with cinematographer Russell Carpenter and effects supervisor Daniel Sudick. The 3-D is artful and has a clear purpose. The finale is something else – a symphony of comedy and action mayhem that outclasses every single second that comes before it. Nothing else in the movie even comes close.
This will either send you home happy or have you wondering why the first hour wasn’t as good as the final minutes. Paul Rudd plays our lead, Scott Lang, a petty thief enlisted by Pym to steal Cross’s “Yellowjacket” armor before a bad situation gets worse. Pym trains Lang with the help of his estranged daughter Hope (Evangeline Lilly). She’s also Cross’s confidant but falls more in line ethically with her father. The opportunity to be a superhero gives Lang a shot at redemption, which also means a shot at weekend visitation rights with his daughter.
Ant-Man settles on “Tell, Don’t Show” as its approach, and many of its scenes have an odd redundancy to them. We’re told repeatedly that Lang is an activist who only targets one-percenters, but we never see this from Lang himself. Not only does he not express his personal politics (though other characters do it for him), he easily allies himself with a one-percenter when the time comes to do the job. Similarly, other characters reference Darren Cross slowly going insane from exposure to his formula of shrinking particles, but we never actually see this happen. The film already opens with Cross as an opportunistic slimeball so there’s no discernible change, and we never see him use the particles on himself. Even if other characters are saying it, we’re simply not seeing it.
Rumors of Marvel’s heavy hand in the editing room are more apparent here as well, with a gore gag involving a shrinking lamb noticeably out of sequence with that scene’s obvious pay-off, which actually happens in a bathroom minutes before. Moments of the film are indistinguishable from Marvel’s TV product, directed too matter-of-factly, framed against blandly glossy sets, and scored to a irritatingly generic facsimile of what movie music should sound like. Characters have conversations shot in talking head medium close-ups; the better to edit with, since no one is talking to anyone who is visible in the frame with them. Your ability to forgive Ant-Man’s overall lack of polish, from script to screen, will vary.
The reason for that is that Ant-Man is very entertaining when, y’know, it’s being entertaining. Rudd is scrappy and confident, Douglas is always a welcome screen presence, and the core concept of a tiny guy who can control ants provides enough of a foundation for zany FX-driven action-adventure that it seems almost difficult to mess up. Peyton Reed snaps awake when he gets to play with moments like Ant-Man’s ant training montage or the way Ant-Man fights or how Ant-Man’s environment is shot depending on his size. Effects have come a long way since Honey, I Shrunk the Kids and so much of Ant-Man really does feel like we are seeing something we haven’t seen before. It’s CG done for the purpose of bringing scale to life and it works incredibly well.
Comic fans will enjoy seeing Lang brought to the screen faithfully. Pym isn’t quite the guy we know from the comics, but that’s primarily due to the actor’s age. Marvel, perhaps knowing this, gives us some specifically nerdy Pym-related Easter eggs and some direct Avengers nods to satisfy any feelings of comic book unfaithfulness. Yellowjacket, though a name associated with Pym in the comics, is very much his own thing here, and putting Darren Cross in the armor is similar all-around to Iron Man‘s Iron Monger. The design of his costume elevates him into something memorable, (even if the screenplay lets him down). He looks damn cool.
So, Ant-Man is “good but…” and not “great and…” Good but sloppy. Good but talky. Good but not great. It’s tinier than Age of Ultron, which is to be expected, but still beholden to setting up pieces for the next Marvel Studios event picture, if you’re curious. I can’t speak to the Edgar Wright situation, and I don’t know that his long-gestating version would’ve been better because it doesn’t exist. I can only speak to the film I saw and it’s going to make some Ant-Man fans for the very first time, which is Marvel’s modest goal despite the film’s immodest budget. See it in 3-D; see it for the fun of it, but decide for yourself if Marvel’s recent fare shows they might be getting too comfortable as the king of the box office anthill.
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Source:: http://www.movies.com/movie-news/ant-man-review/18846?wssac=164&wssaffid=news
