Ant Man
Ant Man
Ant-Man
Marvel's Ant-Man
Do you remember those 'Fathers 4 Justice' guys that used to dress up as superheroes and stay on rooftops for days in order to protest the injustice of access rights? Those guys are going to love Ant-Man which is about a guy sent to prison for doing the right thing, a guy who reluctantly dresses up as a superhero, an estranged husband whose ex-wife is now dating a cop and a guy who only wants to see his cutesy gap-toothed daughter more often. He just wants to be a hero to his little girl but the only thing he is good at is stealing stuff, which is just as well, because instead of a plot we basically just have scenes of people stealing stuff from other people.
Ant-Man is a minor Marvel character given a minor Marvel treatment. It's a strangely old-fashioned film, like it's a couple of decades out of time. It takes ages to shift into gear, it's full of safe decisions and plays like a 'Mission Impossible' knock-off. There's the usual stuff of people breaking in to secure facilities, dropping stealthily from cables, being pursued down corridors etc... whilst hackers in a van watch a progress bar reach 99.9% even as the doors are being kicked in. It's probably very exciting if you've never seen a Mission Impossible film, or a spy film....or any film ever.
Bland comedy chancer Paul Rudd is Ant-Man. He's this generation's Steve Guttenberg.
Notorious sex addict Michael Douglas is in this too. He must have been very confused to appear in scenes with Evangeline Lilly looking exactly like Catherine Zeta Jones in her 'Chicago' days. I bet Michael couldn't keep his hands off her, the dirty old git. They must have distracted him by giving him that same "you don't know what chaos you'll unleash" speech to do in every scene he appears in. Surely they could have made better use of him? Maybe they could have made him the villain. He'd have done a much better job than Corey Stoll who gives us the blandest villain yet in the Marvel universe.
The trouble with 'Ant-Man' is that it is not a bad film but that it needs more of everything. It needs more action, it needs more laughs, more SFX (or at least some impressive ones), it certainly needs more plotting and more energy. It's very sluggish for a Marvel film. Every time it hits on a good idea it just drops the ball. Breaking into The Avengers headquarters, great idea. What happens? Ant-Man has a silly fight with Marvel's (other) least interesting hero and somebody gets punched through a shutter. That's it. Ant-Man reduced to the sub-atomic/quantum level, great idea. What happens? Some lame attempt at pixelated trippy imagery and that's it. Ant-Man has to fight the villain on a toy train set, great idea. What happens? A piss poor sub-Wallace and Gromit routine.
It feels like it was made by committee. It feels like it was made just to keep the Marvel universe rolling without adding anything to it. It feels like a stop-gap. It feels like all the eccentricities and life and joy of the project have been bleached out of it. Marvel have set the bar with every film. Here they can barely be arsed to step over it.
I get that it's supposed to be a "fun" movie, I get that it is the action-comedy aspects are the focus this time ....but I saw it in a cinema full of kids who seemed barely engaged with it. They laughed twice. Once at the word "shit!" and once at Thomas The Tank Engine's face. That's your review right there. That's the highlights.
Most kids were more interested in jumping down the auditorium steps. I've got to admit, they had a point.
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