Small but perfectly formed
Even with a dozen films under their belt, Marvel Studios are still finding new ways to play within the confines of the comicbook genre. And in the case of Ant-Man, they’ve created something you really haven’t seen for a long time: a superhero who sweats the small stuff.
Scott Lang (Paul Rudd) doesn’t deal in ruined cities or plummeting spacecraft. He trains in his mentor’s back garden and fights his archnemesis in his seven-year-old daughter’s bedroom. Of course, when Scott shrinks to near-microscopic size, these ordinary locations turn into hyperreal landscapes alive with threat.
A lawn becomes a forest teeming with monstrous insects, while a room full of computer servers transforms into a neon-bright skyscraper district.
But Ant-Man’s switches in scale aren’t just a gimmick: the three years Scott has just spent in prison for a Robin Hood-like burglary, and away from his daughter Cassie, feel enough like the end of the world that impending armageddon isn’t required to raise the stakes.
Scott wants to prove to his wife (Judy Greer) and her new partner (Bobby Cannavale) that he’s still a fit father – although that takes money, the pursuit of which leads him to maverick inventor Dr Hank Pym (Michael Douglas) and his business whizz daughter Hope (Evangeline Lilly).
They need him to undertake some corporate espionage and retrieve a copy of his incredible shrinking suit technology, with the aid of the secret original prototype from the midSixties, which Hank still keeps locked up in his basement.
The Ant-Man suit itself is a thing of steampunkish beauty, with its worn black-and-red leather and helmet that looks like a curled-up robotic woodlouse. It belongs in the same world as Joe Johnson’s Second World War-set Captain America: The First
Avenger – and there’ s something delightful about the idea, glimpsed here in a fun aside, that Douglas was romping around as a superhero himself during the Cold War and never got any credit.
It’s tempting to credit these throwaway coups to Edgar Wright,
Ant-Man’s original director, and his writing partner Joe Cornish, who both toiled over the script for the best part of a decade only to unexpectedly part ways with it in May last year, mere weeks before shooting was scheduled to begin. In its very best moments, the film zings with an Aardman-esque zaniness that feels like pure Wright, even if his replacement as director, Peyton Reed, wisely resists the temptation to mimic his predecessor’s hyper-caffeinated visual style.
The one person Reed borrows some tricks from is Ant-Man himself. Plenty of sequences, both comedy and action, build towards climaxes that unexpectedly turn into anti-climaxes, and the sudden shrinking of the scene’s horizons has a disorienting effect that’s both funny and startling.
Perhaps that’s what makes Rudd so peculiarly well-suited to the role. In films such as Wanderlust and I Love
You, Man, his comic delivery has an endearing, half-fumbled quality. In
Ant-Man, he apologises to a B-list Avenger in the middle of beating them up. It makes you realise that the one thing the Marvel films have been missing until now is a very human unease with super-heroism.
What we’ve seen since the 2008 beginnings of the Marvel serial is bigger casts, grander set-pieces and more intricate interplay between characters, with no clear end in sight.
Ant-Man scuttles off in the other direction. Brisk humour, keenly felt dramatic stakes, and invention over scale. You know: small pleasures.
Three years in prison feel enough like the end of the world that armageddon isn’t needed to raise stakes