Skip to main content

Ant-Man

The Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU) keeps churning along and now presents it's second most bizarre addition. The first was Guardians of the Galaxy, my favorite Marvel film by a long shot. Now, Ant-Man, which I love despite myself.
 
Scott Lang (Paul Rudd) just wants to leave behind his life of petty crime and make things right with his daughter Cassie (Abby Ryder), who lives with his former wife Maggie (Judy Greer) and her new police officer husband, Paxton (Bobby Cannavale). His life takes a turn for the strange when he's recruited by brilliant scientist Dr. Hank Pym (Michael Douglas) to stop his former protégé Darren Cross (Corey Stoll) from doing something stupid. Hank's daughter Hope (Evangeline Lilly) objects. Superhero hijinks involving tiny superheroes and villains ensues.
 
Originally this was going to be Edgar Wright's contribution to the MCU, but apparently producer Kevin Feige expected the writer/producer/director of, among other things, Scott Pilgrim Versus the World to conform to the MCU formula. Wright declined and left the project.
 
Which is a pity, since you can sense little bits of Wright throughout much of the film, and they are the best parts. Not that director Peyton Reed does a bad job. Indeed, he has a light touch and was smart enough to leave much of Wright's writing alone, or so it seems to me.
 
The premise of the film is silly enough. Sure, let's have a superhero whose super ability is to shrink to the size of an ant while at the same time gaining super strength and the ability to control ants. It's vaguely crazy, and the screenplay goes there. The plot itself is little more than a reimagining of the story from the first Iron Man film. That worked in Iron Man because the roles felt more intimate; our hero was the one personally involved. In Ant-Man, the relationship between Our Hero and Our Villain is a couple of steps removed, so the central conflict is more remote.
 
Indeed, Ant-Man continues the MCU pattern of having terrible villains. The exception to this has been Loki (Tom Hiddleston). The urge is to give full credit to Hiddleston, who is simply wonderful in the role, but the real credit goes to Loki having an actual goal (to rule Asgard while extracting a modicum of revenge) that is easily identified and even, to an extent, relatable. As nice a job as Corey Stoll does, he's just another wacko lusting for power for power's sake, money for money's sake, and oh ho hum let's move along, shall we?
 
The first two acts of the film move along at a decent clip, but I didn't really feel all that engaged. When the nutty action breaks out in the third act, though, I was laughing out loud precisely when the writers and director wanted me to. There are absurd moments in the film where we jump back out of the miniature world where the fight is taking place and back to normal size. Thus, the sounds of battle go away and a little toy train falls off its tracks. Things like this happen a couple of times, and this is where I felt Wright's contribution the strongest. Reed wisely does this only a few times, keeping the humor fresh without letting it wear our its welcome.
 
Which pretty much sums up the entire film. It's outright funny in many places, deliberately so. Thus, you're laughing with it rather than at it, which is always a good thing. The plot is also much more intimate, rather than involving yet another existential threat to the planet. Of course it all wraps up with set ups for sequels and a tie-in with future Marvel films (look to the future and see our tiny hero in next year's Captain America: Civil War).
 
This is probably as strange as Marvel films will get, at least until the Sorcerer Supreme, Doctor Strange, appears in late 2016, but it's great fun and there's nothing wrong with that.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Not the Hero We Deserve, But the Hero We Need

The Dark Knight is the best film I’ve seen in years. Not just the best “superhero” film, but the best film of any type. It’s not perfect, not quite a masterpiece, but it’s flaws are, to me, tiny and overwhelmed by the time the film ends. While relatively bloodless, it is consistently brutal, not just in what it depicts but in the themes that drive it. TDK is a film for adults, please leave the kids at home. Let’s deal with those “flaws” first, the largest being the character Rachel Dawes . In Batman Begins , I blamed Katie Holmes . Her acting was weak, to say the least, which is regrettable in that who she is and what she says and does are important to the film. Critics agreed and either for that or other reasons, Katie was replaced by Maggie Gyllenhaal , who is a better actress. Yet here she’s weak, real weak. Maybe it’s the character, not the actress, which is frustrating because Rachel is a pivotal character. The film,...
1 comment
Read more

John Wick: Chapter 4

No sense in playing coy, this is a great film. I’ve seen it twice and while I don’t quite love it in the way I love the first, original John Wick , it’s my #2. It’s a little overlong, has some wasted space and time, has one absolutely pointless and useless character, and generally ignores the realities of firefights, falling, getting shot, hit, etc. All that notwithstanding, it’s a great action flick, has a genuine emotional core, and is well worth your time if you’re into that sort of thing. Like I am. Summary: John Wick (Keanu Reeves), last seen saying he was fed up with the High Table, goes to war to obtain his freedom. Some of the most incredible action scenes ever filmed ensue, culminating in a very satisfactory finale and a devastating post-credit scene. The first Wick film was a surprise hit. It was a simple, straight-forward tale of vengeance told in a simple, straight-forward manner. Where it stood out was its devotion to human stunt work, on exploiting long camera shots that ...
Post a Comment
Read more

DVD: The Day the Earth Stood Still (2008)

Awful. The film is an environmentalist wacko wet dream. No one else could like this thing. I’m trying to think of something positive and all I can come up with is how positively awful it is. The original The Day the Earth Stood Still is a science fiction masterpiece. In it, Klaatu comes to Earth with a simple message: Do what you want among yourselves and on your planet. But if you attempt to export your violent way to the stars, Gort and his friends will hit you with so many lefts you’ll beg for a right. (Gort being the cosmic version of Chuck Norris, you see.) The ultimate warning was that we needed to change our violent ways if we expected to be accepted among the stars. In this remake, the aliens are environmental busy-bodies who have bought into the entire notion that we puny little humans are capable of destroying the planet. Therefore, we must be eliminated so that the planet, for God knows what reason, can try again. To count the ways in which this film makes no sense ...
1 comment
Read more