I’ve enjoyed all of Marvel’s output to varying degrees (even
their lesser efforts have more personality and competency than the average
mainstream movie that I’m never entirely turned off). But I’m also getting the
tiniest bit tired with “The Marvel Movie”. Look at the basic storytelling
structure and beats of almost every Marvel film and you will see that they’re
really just doing variants on the same story. This becomes particularly obvious
in the ways that the third acts of their films are almost indistinguishable,
gargantuan, bruising, muddled CGI spectacles. It’s symptomatic of the
too-big-too-fail model of filmmaking, where safe-guarding one's claim to the throne is more important than using that claim to re-invent the wheel.
This is why it’s pleasantly surprising to watch Ant-Man. Its ambitions are as small as
its protagonist. It’s a heist movie disguised as a superhero movie. It has
moments of wry, almost self-aware humor that poke fun at its premise and Marvel
movies in general and that make excellent use of Paul Rudd’s comic persona.
There’s a romantic subplot you can recognize from a mile away that consummates
itself in a hilariously low-key and self-deprecating way. This might be the
most off-beat Marvel movie if Guardians
of the Galaxy hadn’t already safely claimed that title.
Ant-Man isn’t
nearly as good as that other Marvel film, but it is fleet and light. It never
appears to want to do anything more than hit its mark and get out of its own
way. It scarcely bothers with tying itself to the larger Marvel universe.
Instead, it tells an isolated story about an electrical engineer turned former career
criminal Scott Lang (Rudd, his typically affable, appealing self) who wishes to
go the straight-and-narrow for the sake of his young daughter Cassie (Abby
Ryder Fortson). Lang fancied himself a Robin Hood-type, using his tech savvy to
burglarize (not rob, that implies threat of violence) to take away money from
huge corporations. His ex-wife (Judy Greer, who seems to be taking a lot of
these thankless wife/mother roles lately) and her new husband (Bobby Cannavale)
refuse visitation rights to him until he can get his act together.
Lang can’t find work due to his status as a former convict.
Unable to pay child support, he falls back on old way and takes a burglary job
suggested by his roommates (Michael Peña, Tip "T.I." Harris, and David
Dastmalchian, providing occasionally unnecessarily wacky comic relief). It’s a
robbery that as it turns out has been set up by Michael Pym (Michael Dougla), a
scientist and corporate mogul who’s best remembered for his attempts to shrink
the distance between atoms (and thus shrinking the size of people). Pym gave up
on this project when he realized its dangers. His insanely driven, and possibly also just
insane, protégée Darren Cross (Corey Stoll) has reinitiated the project. Pym
used the robbery to test Lang’s abilities. He’s chosen Lang to steal Cross’s shrinking
suit known as the Yellowjacket.
What I’ve just described is roughly the first third of the
film. It feels rushed and over-written (even my explanation of it sounds slightly convoluted). It takes unnecessarily elaborate and
involved ways to get Pym and Lang together. The film’s plot contorts itself in
strange ways to get at such a simple plot necessity (Why does Pym come up with
this complicated scheme to recruit Lang?
It doesn’t make sense if you stop to think about it. Not that the film wants
you to do that). While the film’s pretty entertaining in these early-goings, it
becomes so much better once it get Lang and Pym together, along with Pym’s reluctant,
skeptical daughter Hope van Dyne (Evangeline Lily). With Lang in the Ant-Man
suit, training montage style, there’s a clarity and directness to the film
because it’s in full-on superhero origin story mode by this point. The film begins to click on every level in
the following two thirds and the films becomes so consistently entertaining
from here on out that it’s easy to forget the early clumsiness.
Perhaps some of this early storytelling messiness is due to
the production shake-ups that made everyone hesitant about how the final
product of this film would turn out. Edgar Wright was slated to direct the film
but left production after complaints about too much studio interference (Wright
still receives a writing and story credit along with Joe Cornish, while Adam
McKay and Rudd also receive writing credits). New director Peyton Reed’s
previous credits did little to assuage fears that the new vision for the film
would be successful. Bring It On, The Break-Up and Yes Man aren’t necessarily bad films but they also don’t scream
top-shelf quality. Ant-Man rarely
features anything visually dynamic (it’s pretty boiler-plate and occasionally
visually dull), but it’s not poorly made.
Yet to say Ant-Man
is completely devoid of dynamism would be untrue. For one thing, the action is
the most distinctive and playful that Marvel has possibly ever done (McKay and
Rudd’s late contributions to the script are easy to imagine as partially contributing
to this. McKay’s work – Anchorman, Step Brothers – is ingeniously silly
and sly). The film makes fantastic use of its protagonist’s abilities in order
to construct fight sequences that are entirely unlike any from previous Marvel
movies. Ant-Man moves back and forth between sizes, and he’s armed with
technology that allows him to command armies of actual ants. There’s a final fight
sequence fought shrunken down on top of a toy train set that is glorious. It’s
funny, charming, self-aware, and still thrilling, and it encapsulates
everything the film gets right.
If Ant-Man never
hits skyscraper-high heights, it’s just too grounded to care. Its mindset is
scaled down, say to the size of an ant.
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