Refrshingly Small

Rating: 8/10 (17 July 2015)

Ant-Man was one of those movies that was almost hard to believe they were going to try to make into a movie. Even in the trailers they made fun of the name and predictably the general public followed. The buzz for this movie seemed minimal with friends and if anything was said about it, usually it came from a negative perspective. I had some hope for this film though, I think Paul Rudd is hilarious and the overall commitment to a more comedic cast, director and writers seemed like a promising fit for Marvel instead of action guys writing comic relief.
Ant-Man begins with a young Michael Douglas, playing Dr. Hank Pym, arguing with some members of SHIELD about an invention of his and him not sharing it with them. You find out early that his wife is dead and he has no intentions of letting SHIELD use his application, in fear of what could happen if it gets into the wrong hands. Then fast forward to present day, Scott Lang, who is in prison for burglary, (Rudd) gets released in a pretty amusing scene. You learn a great deal about the Lang character quickly. He has a daughter, with a women who is now engaged to a cop, and that he is not allowed to see her until he gets his life together and can pay his alimony. You learn more of his criminal activity that landed him in prison and the almost Robin Hood persona it follows. He gets a job and gets fired due to a background check and a struggle follows of Rudd's character trying to stay away from the life of crime, but wanting to be able to be in his daughter's life.
Paul Rudd is absolutely perfect for this role and breaths a lot of life into this movie, same goes for Michael Douglas. The comedy to this point was pretty effective and invoked my laughs and the people around me in the theater. The movie was slow getting to the super hero part, but in hindsight I think that's a strength of Ant-Man because this worked better as a heist and unconventional super hero movie better than it would of as a grand scale typical Marvel movie.
Through struggles and pressures Scott Lang decided to do a heist his friend Luis, hilarious turn by Michael Peña, has set up and has been trying to get him to do. Showing his physical and intellectual skills, Lang gets in with ease but discovers instead of money or gold, their is a suit in the vault. Dr. Pym turns out to be recruiting Scott to be the new Ant-Man and tries to sell the idea to him as he tries on the suit and gets himself into a little trouble. Wanting nothing to do with this he returns the suit, breaking in again, but this time gets caught by the cops and sent to jail. At this point he has no options but to join Pym as he has a plan to bust him out of jail. Throughout the movie you get the antagonist Darren Cross, played by Corey Stoll (House of Cards), revealing he is getting close to achieving something similar Dr. Pym's technology, the Yellowjacket suit. This is why Pym is recruiting Rudd's character, to use him and his own Ant-Man suit to steal Cross's Yellowjacket suit before he sells it to some rather sketchy people.
As talked about earlier, the ant sized scope of this film is refreshing compared to the rest of the Marvel universe. Instead of the fight for the world on a grand scale you get an intimate fight with those same stakes in the background. The obviously coming "climatic fight scene" was also surprisingly original and had some interesting and new elements even thought the setting isn't what you would think of as an interesting setting for this type of movie's climax.
The humor overall was a strength of the movie and didn't take away from the dramatic elements as other Marvel films usually are guilty of. There were scenes were they used the same type of punch line over and over which got tedious and corny. Some of the dialogue in the fight scenes were also pretty comically bad and the villain Corey Stoll was a pretty poorly written and uninteresting character in my book. They tried something interesting with the effect the suit and science has on people involved that could of been developed into an interesting development for the Stoll character, but that was completely ditched and what we ended up with was a pretty Clichéd character.
Ant-Man is the best Marvel movie of the year, which is only a moderate accomplishment due to Age of Ultron being so average. With great humor comes great responsibility and overall the cast, writers, and director don't let down Uncle Ben's famous line that I just butchered to fit my review. The intimate scope is refreshing and daring for a Marvel franchise that has become obsessed with destroying whole cities with not much of a thought. Not great but absolutely good enough to catch in theaters for a fun ride following this unique super-hero.
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