Edgar Wright did not direct Ant-Man. Can we just get that out of the way? Ever since Wright’s very public departure from the film last year – a project he had been working on since the Bush administration – Ant-Man has had a cloud over it. Internet critics salivated over the prospect of ripping into a Marvel film; they relished the idea of cutting down a studio with a near-perfect track record. All because a director whom the Internet happens to love parted ways with the project. Can you imagine the pressure that put on replacement Petyon Reed (Yes Man, Bring It On)? In many ways, this film seemed doomed from the start. I saw it more out of obligation than curiosity, and much to my surprise, I enjoyed the hell out of it. If you can divorce Ant-Man from the controversy surrounding its production, you’re going to have a great time with this film.
Ant-Man stars Paul Rudd as Scott Lang, a Robin Hood-type cyber criminal who got sent to San Quentin for hacking into a huge company and giving money back to customers it had screwed over. On top of that, he’s trying desperately to reconnect with his daughter, despite interference from his ex wife (Judy Greer) and her new husband (Bobby Cannavale). Right away, we’re off to a rough start, because this motivation is so done to death that it was parodied in the Futurama episode “Raging Bender” (Rudd all but turns to the camera and repeats Bender’s line “I’m just an ex-con trying to go straight and get my kids back”). If any other actor were playing Scott, then, yeah, I could see, maybe even justify all this backstory. But Paul Rudd is the most likable person on the planet. The audience is in the tank for him from page one.
After his job prospects in the real world dry up, Scott agrees to rob the house of a retired millionaire, who unbeknownst to him is the original Ant-Man, Hank Pym (a game Michael Douglas, clearly having a ball). He teams up with his ex-cellmate and current roommate Luis (Michael Pena, who almost steals the movie from under Rudd) and reenters a life of crime. Only he doesn’t find any riches in Pym’s safe, just what Scott thinks is a motorcycle suit. As it turns out, the whole robbery was a setup by Pym to see if Scott has what it takes to assume the mantle of Ant-Man (and don’t worry, the name is played for laughs).
What separates Ant-Man from the rest of Marvel’s oeuvre is a sense of fun. This should come as no surprise, seeing as how the script underwent extensive rewrites not only by Rudd but by his Anchorman director Adam McKay as well. It’s the closest thing that Marvel has had to a standalone film since Guardians of the Galaxy, even though it is tasked with tying in the narrative to the shared universe Marvel has been building. In a telling – and hilarious moment – Pym outlines exactly why Scott’s mission is so important, and Scott reacts with “Step one – I think we should call the Avengers.”
There’s even a sequence where Rudd has a run-in with an actual Avenger, the Falcon, as played by a welcome Anthony Mackie (I don’t count this as a spoiler; it’s been in a couple commercials). I’ve seen critics elsewhere bitch and moan about how shoehorned-in this sequence feels, and I couldn’t disagree more. Let’s not forget that Ant-Man (the Hank Pym incarnation) was one of the original Avengers, and it was he, not Tony Stark, who birthed Ultron, the baddie from Marvel’s other offering this summer. (Jesus, remember when it was a big deal to have one superhero movie in theaters?) Ant-Man’s fight scene against the Falcon is kinetic, bravura filmmaking, and Reed really knows how to handle both the inherent silliness and potential coolness in his character.
Scott’s size changes constantly, even in mid-battle, and the effect is akin to the great Nightcrawler sequence at the beginning of X2: X-Men United. This could be a potential pitfall, because if the audience has no idea where the combatants are, fights are understandably hard to follow. Luckily for Ant-Man‘s sake, this is never the case. It helps that Scott’s enemy, Darren Cross, aka Yellowjacket (The Strain‘s Corey Stoll, mercifully unburdened by that show’s hairpiece) also has the ability to shrink. I tried not to bring up Edgar Wright in this review, but there’s a battle that takes place inside of a falling briefcase that seems like a sequence Wright was born to direct.
In fact, Ant-Man eschews the now-obligatory city-destroying climax (in fact, most of Ant-Man is structured like a heist movie), as the final battle takes place in a child’s bedroom (unfortunately spoiled by the trailers). That doesn’t diminish – sorry for the pun – the sense of peril. If anything it makes the sequence more engrossing, because, put quite simply, we haven’t seen anything like this in a Marvel movie before. It’s scenes like this that breathe new life into what was becoming a stale formula of tortured heroes who usually have to close a portal to another dimension (looking at you, The Avengers and Pacific Rim).
The film is not without its faults, though, and one might blame that on the troubled production and extensive rewrites (Wright is still credited as a writer, as is Joe Cornish, director of Attack the Block). For instance, Scott is established as a pretty talented hacker, but that does nothing to explain his facility with safe cracking or shimmying up walls. Stoll is saddled with a pretty stock character – the evil white man in a suit – but he gets to redeem himself when he puts on the Yellowjacket suit. When he looks at Scott’s daughter and tonelessly asks “Do I look like a monster?” it’s a genuinely chilling moment.
This film could have been a disaster. The premise is silly, but Ant-Man does itself a huge favor by steering into the skid (Scott both rides and controls ants, and somehow this doesn’t look stupid). At best, I think most of us were imagining this as a feature-length trailer, in the vein of Iron Man 2. I’ve seldom been happier to be proven wrong. Paul Rudd sells the hell out of this film – he clearly lost no enthusiasm for the role after the original director’s departure – and if people give Ant-Man a chance, I think they’ll be as pleasantly surprised as I was.
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