Films > Film Reviews
Ant Man
13/07/15
Much like most comic book aficionados, we have been anticipating the release of Ant-Man with increasingly mixed emotions; joy when we heard that Edgar Wright, director of the exemplary Cornetto Trilogy (Shaun…, Fuzz, etc.), was involved, then sadness when he fucked it off. This led to confusion and anxiety, and doubts about what would happen next, especially when Peyton Reed, director of Bring it On and other such by-the-book, bog standard pisswash, was drafted in with nary a blip in the filming schedule.
So Wright writ some of it, right? Then they got Joe Cornish (Attack the Block) to Wright, sorry, write some more, and then two other Wrighters jumped on board, too. Confused? Of course you are. And so is this film, which, as a consequence of its mixed penning pedigree, has turned out to be a bit of a mongrel. It’s not quite camp, zany, or funny enough to pull off the premise of the world’s most who-gives-a-shit superhero, but nor does anyone involved seem able to take its size-shifting nonsense seriously.
Here’s why: Meet Scott Lang (Paul Rudd). Scott gets special powers from Michael Douglas’s old suit, which he steals from a vault while Michael secretly watches. Creepy, right? However, this scheisty heist is merely Lang’s audition to become… the Ant-Man. A man who can shrink to the size of an ant, but still punches with the strength of… AN ANT! Or… A MAN! We don’t really understand how that bit works, but wait until you hear about this bit: It would be pretty difficult to get around town if you were ant-sized, right? Well, he can control ants telepathically, and one of the wingy-ones has got a little saddle for him to ride on. Admittedly, that’s still pretty slow, so he usually takes the bus and then shrinks when he arrives at his destination.
Douglas and his daughter (Evangeline Lilly) proceed to put Lang through a rigorous montage in order to take on Douglas’s ex- protégé (Corey Stoll) who finds some of his old mentor’s notebooks, and is also pretty close to cracking Da Titchy code. Unfortunately, he’s a top arsehole, and he’s got lasers, so Douglas wants Ant-Man to steal his books back and blow his lab up. And that’s Act One of the most ridiculous Marvel movie yet – and, yes, we’ve seen the one with the tree and the talking racoon.
Ants survive through co-operation, and as well as the different varieties of formica at his behest, Ant-Man is accompanied by a team of fun lovin’ diminals so tokenistically diverse they’re like the Usual Suspects sponsored by Benetton. Meet Keyser José (Michael Pena), Rob n the Hood, (T.I.), and the Italian (?) Knob (David Dastmalchian). Questionable racial profiling aside, their scenes are the most enjoyable and Wrightesque (Wrightian? Wrightey?) in the film, and Pena’s bumbling thief steals every scene he’s in.
It’s not all bad. There is a brilliant miniature fight scene, which is in equal parts exciting and absurd, and Paul Rudd is a likeable addition to Marvel’s wise-cracking comic-book cadre. However, the will-they-won’t-they-of-course-they-will sub-plot between Lilly and Rudd seems like a crude afterthought, and their inevitable bumping of faces has all the romance of a ruined picnic.
By the time we reach the ludicrous anty-climax, in which the sub-quantum world where “all laws of time and space are meaningless” is represented as a Windows 95 screensaver featuring Michael Douglas’s disembodied voice echoing the words “all laws of time and space are meaningless,” we were well aware of the feeling. To paraphrase Einstein, “when you’re with a beautiful woman, an hour seems like a minute; when you have your hand in a flame, a minute seems like watching the end of Ant-Man. Fuck that film.”
Marvel Studios apparently did the bare minimum of myrmecological research before making this movie, which is a shame, because if they’d paid a bit more attention to how ants work together towards a clear and singular goal, they too might have built an impressive hill, rather than this messy pile.
3/10