Ant-man is Cool!

Rating: 8/10 (2 January 2016)

Ant-Man is a cool movie that delivers the right combo of action, seriousness, drama, and comedy. The story revolves around the original founder, Hank Pym (Michael Douglas) who discovers technology that can shrink a human to the size of ants. Not only that, but his technology also allows him to lead ants to help him in various ways.
20 years or so after the fact, Pym's protégé, Cross (Corey Stoll) is on the verge of finally replicating Pym's work, but he intends to make money from it, not benefit humankind. The battle is on between Pym and Cross, with Pym's daughter Hope (Evangenline Lilly) working undercover within Cross's organization.
Then enter Scott Lang (Paul Rudd), a cat burglar extraordinaire who Pym deems as the best candidate to put on his Ant-Man suit that he has kept hidden all this time, and use his skills to stop Cross before it's too late.
The story is fascinating. The CGI is incredible, with the small sized combatants doing incredible stuff, and funny stuff too. The acting is really terrific from Douglas and Rudd, but a huge kudos to Rudd's partner in crime, Luis (Michael Pena), who delivers some incredible dialog that really blew me away with the editing to make it work big time. Cory Stoll really reminded me a lot of the performance of Ted Levine in Silence of the Lambs - very good stuff.
There's also a fantastic flashback scene of Pym when he was 20 or more years younger, and there was Michael Douglas, when he was late 30's or early 40's. How the CGI people do this is incredible - like the latest Terminator Genisys movie with Schwartzenegger from now fighting against the original Terminator.
At almost 2 hours length, it's just the right amount of story, as the movie moves along quickly. I had never heard of Director Peyton Reed, but after this success, I'm sure we'll be hearing more from him. It also looks like Ant-Man will get somehow tied into the Avengers series, based on the number of cross references between these movies.
Ant-Man delivers an excellent non-stop film that will leave you cheering. Crawl on down to watch it. Enjoy.