Fun and silly...if not flawed

Rating: 7/10 (6 April 2020)

We open almost twenty years before the first Iron Man in Nineteen eighty-nine. Dr. Hank Pym (a brilliant Douglas) is meeting with S.H.I.E.L.D's head of defence Mitchel Carson (a rather slimy Martin Donovan), along with Howard Stark and Peggy Carter. Pym has discovered that S.H.I.E.L.D. are trying to replicate a very special and powerful formula of his for their own use and he vows they will never get their hands on it.
After skipping back to the present time, Scott Lang (Paul Rudd, Forgetting Sarah Marshall and The Perks of Being a Wallflower) is leaving prison (see the WHiH Exclusives regarding that) and is picked up by his old friend Luis (a wonderful Peña). Determined to now go straight and confident of landing a job with his Masters in engineering, Scott ends up working at a fast food joint in which he promptly gets fired due to his past transgressions.
Unfortunatly for scott he ends up back with Luis and his associates who want him to join up for a job cracking a safe, which they learned about from brother's nephew's cousin's former roommate. Meanwhile Hank Pym has been invited to Futures Lab at Cross Technologies for a presentation regarding a tiny super soldier headed up by Darren Cross, the former protege and student of Hank's. Darren is making huge strides in replicating Hank's formula is ready to sell it to the highest bidder (yup you guessed it, HYDRA).
Now for myself this was an unusual Marvel superhero film. It never really feels like a superhero film and nor does it ever really feel like a Marvel film either. What it does feel like though is a typical Edgar Wright production and the whole film plays out more as a Wright comedy than a Marvel film. All it needed was Pegg and Frost to pop up and everything would have complete in the world. In all seriousness though, I'm very surprised neither were shoehorned in somewhere for a quick cameo (or I missed them).
The plot line is a little convulated and uneccessary but it flows along nicely without any awkward moments and there is never really a moment where the film drags, though the start of the film left a lot to be desired and could have been stronger. The script is actually half-decent and fits the whole vibe of the film, though the comedy and one-liners are typical Wright, so if you are a fan of his you will know what to expect.
Cast wise, everyone is pretty good here. Michael Douglas is excellent as one would expect but I really wasn't feeling Evangeline Lilly at all. She was much better in The Hobbit films. Paul Rudd, while never a favourite of mine is largely excellent and from what little I know, seems to fill the boots of the character very well. The three wombats (as Pym despairingly refers to them) provide the majority of the laughs with most of those coming from Peña.
The special effects are pretty good and while there is nothing particularly outstanding happens in terms of explosive set-pieces, the miniature (or enlarged, depending how you see it) action scenes are pretty well filmed and do add a great sense of scale. There is a little too much blur in some of the sequences but it does not put you off visually too much. Likewise the soundtrack is also good and fades nicely into the background without being in your face (ala Iron Man).
Overall Ant-Man is a fun film (if not a stellar character in Marvel's line up), and it is certainly helped along by great casting and Wrights script. Direction is adequate from (once again for Marvel) a primary television director. I didn't expect to enjoy this one as much as I did and while again the character is rather weak (from an interest point of view) this film does make the most of his rather modest attributes. A middle of the range movie for the cinematic universe.

The Sage's Rating: 7/10