Let’s get small
Did you know that Ant- Man was a founding member of the Avengers?
That’s right. Back in 1963, alongside Iron-Man, Thor and Hulk, there was… a guy who could make himself really small and possessed the strength of a fullsized human. Whoo-hoo! Yes, in the Marvel Comics pantheon, Ant-Man may not command the same awe and respect as, say, Spider-Man or Captain America.
But in Ant-Man, this diminutive superhero regains some traction and inches his way towards rejoining the fearsome
Avengers movie franchise. That’s the thing about Marvel action movies: they’re always bigger, bigger, BIGGER.
In Ant-Man, starring Paul Rudd, Evangeline Lilly and Michael Douglas, that expectation is flipped on its head. Rather than making the monsters bigger, the technology huger, the destruction more large-scale, we focus on a guy hopping around on a shag carpet level, enlisting armies of ants and wasps to help him in carrying out secret missions. The scale is tiny, and that’s (pardon the pun) no small thing to pull off.
Rudd, who has had little superhero experience but co-wrote the script, does a surprisingly credible job with the action moves as well as his usual wisecracks. Directed by Peyton Reed ( Yes Man), the film has a screwball charm lacking in other Marvel superhero franchises.
Rudd plays Scott Lang, an engineer put in jail for theft — after stealing back the pension money ripped off by a corporation, à la Robin Hood. After doing his time, he tries to reconnect with his young daughter Cassie, despite the disapproval of his ex- wife ( Judy Greer)’s new boyfriend (Bobby Cannavale).
Unable to hold a job as an ex-con, Lang is lured back into doing “one more job” by his old burgling buddies including Luis (Michael Peña); but little does he knows he’s being set up by Dr. Hank Pym ( Douglas) and his daughter Hope (Lilly) to help steal back an experimental suit from a research lab at the corporation that fired Pym.
Pym, it quickly develops, was a genius designer who came up with a technology that allows the wearer of his experimental suit to diminish the space between atoms, while retaining his normal strength. Useful in espionage, surveillance operations and the like.
But his initial plans are blown up to sinister proportions by his protégé, Darren Cross (Corey Stoll), who has remade the company into an arms supplier and developed his own suit — the Yellow Jacket — with an aim to create a “peacekeeper” force of tiny soldiers that will perform assassinations and worldwide policing. The usual Marvel Comics dilemma, in other words.
What separates Ant-Man from the pack of Marvel superhero movies is the scale: Lang naturally has to go through a boot camp montage sequence to train in using the Ant-Man suit — which is red and retro, resembling not so much an ant but ‘60s Japanese superhero Ultraman crossed with a 1940s test pilot. These sequences are fun — Lang learning how to shrink down to pass through the keyhole of a locked door at a running gait (though one wonders how many keyholes are left in the world to pass through). He earns the begrudging respect of Hope, who was shut out of her father’s experimental research after her mother died long ago in, ostensibly, a plane crash.
What really sells the movie, though, is the shrunken universe that Ant-Man must learn to navigate: he can communicate (telepathically, it seems) with various ant breeds to assist him in operations. Wasps are useful as air support. Lang learns how to hop his way out of a quickly filling bathtub, ride the currents of a water main, and in one satisfying sequence, fight his opponent inside a briefcase plunging from the sky to the tune of the Cure’s Disintegration, which is playing on a huge iPhone nearby. There are great scenes of Lang pinging around rooms, evading bullets, finding the tiniest cracks to escape through, or regaining full human size — surprise! — at the very moment he needs to deliver a right cross to a bad guy.
Basically, though, this is a heist movie, and as much as Lang is trying to leave behind his former expertise in cat burgling, he is pulled in again to steal back the technology that Cross now plans to turn towards an evil mastery-of-the-universe type deal.
Lilly and Rudd have some good sparring scenes — the two of them obviously did some physical training for the film — and Douglas does his best work in ages, balancing his avuncular purr with a darker timbre, fully getting the joke of the movie that he’s in.
Douglas, incidentally, has recently voiced his opinion on the “phenomenon” of British actors taking over all the “manly” American roles out there these days. He claims American actors are too superficial, too social media-obsessed, too lazy to get proper theater training (and who’s to say he’s wrong?). So the key roles all go to the Russell Crowes and Christian Bales and Hugh Jackmans and Hemsworths out there.
Could be part of the reason this movie is so “made in America,” with nary a Brit or Aussie in sight. Rudd isn’t your typical superhero type, for sure: he’s not even exactly ant-like, let alone as catlike as a burgler. But he’s got comic timing, which helps in a movie that’s not trying to corner the “hard and heavy” market in Marvel action. Ant-Man has its small charms, and it might even be a huge hit (if even a dark horse like Guardians of
the Galaxy can clean up in summer box office, then anything’s possible). A teaser during the credits promises an Avengers tie-up to come with the next Captain America movie. It remains to be seen whether Rudd and Ant-Man are in for the long haul.