Ant-Man

Ant-Man is the latest of Marvel's cinematic endeavors - a kind of odd epilogue to the massive Phase Two. This is the first movie number one since Guardians of the Galaxy, introducing a storied member of the Avengers that is, perhaps, embarrassingly comic-booky - it's relatively easy to sell a guy with a powered armor suit and a super-soldier with an infallible moral compass, but a guy whose power is shrinking requires a certain ironic detachment - something the film uses to great comedic effect.

So how good is it?

While the movie has some real strengths, it's kind of a middle-of-the-pack flick for the Marvel movies. The film drags in the middle, spending a lot of time setting up the big action of the final act, remaining largely confined to Hank Pym's admittedly cool house. Once the action does get going, though, it's a lot of fun. Paul Rudd is, as always, a pleasure to watch - a leading-man guy with a great sense of comic timing and also the uncanny ability to NOT AGE.

The movie straddles the idea of an origin story - Scott Lang's tenure as Ant Man gets its start here, but the tech has existed for a long time, with inventor Hank Pym serving as the original Ant Man (a contemporary of Tony Stark's dad.) Michael Douglas is technically the mentor figure in this movie, but he gets plenty to do - though this is partially due to the fact that the entire middle act is essentially Scott's training montage.

While the film does eventually devolve into your standard one-on-one fight between the superhero and the main villain (though this fight is, like I said earlier, very fun and humorous, especially when they have a train-top fight over an electric Thomas the Tank Engine train set) the structure up until that point is that of a heist movie - Pym's old protege has built a prototype using similar technology to the original Ant-Man suit, but of course he wants to sell it to freaking Hydra (who are apparently still around. Oh hell, nothing stays dead in these movies.)

The film is somewhat problematic in a couple of ways. Most notable is the problem that the movie itself struggles to address. Pym's daughter Hope (Evangeline Lilly) is more familiar with the technology, more familiar with the facility, and has essentially trained to be Ant-Woman her entire life. Pym drags Scott Lang into the role partially because of Lang's experience as a cat burglar, but mostly because he doesn't want anything to happen to Hope.

I get that the comics had Scott Lang take over the role, but Marvel's got a bit of a problem with its lack of female superheroes (seriously: do a Black Widow movie. There is no good reason not to. Scarlett Johansson wants to do it. She's awesome and popular, and you could do a fun spy film.) There's a tease in the post-credits scene that she will take over her mother's role as the Wasp (her mother is "dead" in the sense that she's just waiting to come back in the sequel) but... yeah, I think we could probably use more female superheroes.

The other problem is Lang's team of fellow thieves. He's got a group of three guys who help him out in the heist, and while there are some fun jokes that come from Luis (his old cellmate,) the guys are walking ethnic stereotypes. Luis maybe gets a pass, given that he is the impetus for some of the funniest sequences in the film - as we watch the chain of people giving him leads all lip-synch to what is clearly Luis' paraphrasing of what they said - but the other guys are pretty much "funny deadpan Russian guy" and... uh... "black getaway driver."

The other disappointment of the movie is the question of what might have been. The aforementioned lip-synching sequence feels very Edgar Wright - one of my favorite comedy directors working today - scratch that, favorite directors. Wright is incredibly inventive pushing the medium to the limit in terms of cramming as much cinematic brilliance onto the screen as possible (I just re-watched Hot Fuzz, and even if you consider it the worst of the Cornetto Trilogy, it's still a brilliant and hilarious piece of filmmaking.)

Marvel's movies do have something of a brand to them, and I get that that has been one of the key's to their success, but it does mean that they had to iron out some of the interesting wrinkles Wright must have introduced to the movie.

Still, if you like the Marvel movies (and I think most people who see them do,) you'll get a kick out of this one. It's funny and fun, and it's a nice change of pace to have a superhero movie where the fate of the world isn't at stake (well, one could argue it is, but they're putting a stop to the threat before it's on the level of an enormous city-meteorite that's going to wipe out humanity.)

And with that, we find ourselves at the conclusion of "Phase 2." Next up, starting phase 3, is Captain America: Civil War, which I have high hopes for mainly because I've really liked both of the solo Captain America movies (particularly the second.)