Ant-Man spoiler free review
Ant-Man is a weird one.
There are lots of different reasons for this, not least the very public flight of original writer/director Edgar Wright who had been officially on board the project since 2006 – that’s two years before Iron Man hit cinemas.
Personally, I was massively excited about the prospect of Wright’s take on Ant-Man and how is anarchic cinematic vision would translate to the world of Marvel. We’ll never know exactly what happened but at some point it became clear that he simply couldn’t make the film he wanted.
Wright left little over a year ago with the film cast and ready to shoot, with a new director picked in just a few short days in the form of Peyton Reed. He had a massive task to not only replace the other filmmaker but also rewrite the script (with some help from star Paul Rudd and Adam McKay) and get it out to market.
And he’s actually done a great job, especially under the circumstances. Ant-Man is a very refreshing kind of movie from Marvel, especially in the wake of the excess of Age of Ultron. There’s really only a single main character, a comprehensible villain and a pared back plot which manages to run under two hours.
People have been talking about it as a heist movie for years now and it definitely follows that pattern, introducing a number of jobs, a crew and a sense of a handful of people against a much larger system.
But it’s also a comedy, in a way which is much more straightforward than the wry and knowing sarcasm of much of the rest of the Marvel universe. Rudd is a brilliant comedy performer and the film is at its best when he gets to play off the supporting players in quieter moments – particular an hilarious Michael Pena.
There are definitely hints in these moments of Rudd and McKay’s previous comedic collaborations but the tone stays carefully the good side of farce and make you really look forward to seeing the characters connect over something more than a punch up.
Of course it’s a Marvel movie so action moments also take place but they’re easily the weakest part of the film. The concepts behind the set-pieces – which involve characters who can shrink to a tiny size at will but actually become strong – are mind blowingly great and the macro-visuals are brilliantly imagined.
It’s just generally lacking in energy, especially the zany sort Wright could have brought. These scenes feel like they’ve been patterned after his signature style and with it they come off as oddly inert, with fairly static cameras and little real impact.
They’re not terrible by any means and the production even manages to conjure up some moments you’ve never seen before on the big screen. It’s the comedy that ultimately saves it, particularly Reed’s play with big and large and how the ridiculousness of these micro-battles are shown to the audience.
It’s becoming increasingly difficult to distinguish yourself as a filmmaker in the murky miasma of the Marvel Cinematic Universe and Reed had a doubly difficult task in coming on board late in the process. To his credit, he’s managed to give the film some personality by leaning on the comedy and managing to make Ant-Man’s powers feel spectacular rather than silly.
There’s a lot to be said for a smaller film in this franchise, especially as a kind of firebreak between Ultron and the increasingly crowded Captain American Civil War. Ant-Man ably accomplishes the task of resetting our expectations, giving us a glimpse at the smaller canvass of an everyday hero in the Marvel world before kicking things off again in Phase 3.
Ant-Man is often amusing and generally entertaining but feels very much like it’s from the second string of superheroes. Which is fine but some audience members will be craving the bigger scale and consequence of the a-team.
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