Nice touch of heist movie flavor

Rating: 7/10 (21 July 2015)

An expert safe-cracker Scott Lang just been released from jail determined to turn away from crime. But his history makes it hard to get a job, particularly with a threat of never getting to see his daughter Cassie again. He turns to his old crew who had a tip about a safe. They help Scott infiltrate the place and Scott easily cracks it, but it only contains an old suit. Scott gets curious and puts it on. He hits a switch, and shrinks to the size of an ant and hears someone talking to him. His friend Luis unknowingly flushes him out. Returning the suit to the house Scott gets arrested. Dr. Hank Pym meets him, suggesting him to follow instructions. He obeys and again dons the suit provided and escapes by shrinking. Back at the house Scott finds Pym and his daughter Hope van Dyne. They ask him to be Ant-Man to stop Darren Cross replicating Pym's research and selling it as a weapon.
First Scott must train with the suit, maneuvering in and out of shrink and controlling ants. Scott progresses slowly, making Hope questions Hank's decision and suggests instead she executes the mission, but Hank denies her. Hank reveals a secret about how Hope's mother died. This helps Hope gets easier on Scott, thus she helps him hone ant control. Last part of training has Scott retrieving Hank's technology from Howard Stark's warehouse, but it was given to The Avengers as their new base. Falcon catches Ant-Man breaching the perimeter. But Ant-Man defeats Falcon by shrinking into his suit and tampering the electronics. That night they find Cross sneaked into the house. He invites Pym to Pym Technologies tomorrow. Cross tells Hope, who's been Pym's mole in Cross' lab, that he's increasing security for tomorrow. Scott suggests an idea to bypass the security, but it needs extra men. They add Scott's old crew of Luis, Dave and Kurt.
The next day, Luis infiltrates as a guard and de-pressurizes water mains where Ant-Man goes in. Cross reveals to Pym he managed to replicate Pym's research and selling it to HYDRA, and that he knows Scot's identity. Cross gets Ant-Man trapped inside a glass jar so Hope blows her cover and aims a gun to Cross. Scott throws an enlarging disk and escapes the jar, igniting a shootout which clips Pym on the chest. Cross flees but Ant-Man manages to damage his helicopter. But Cross manages to wear the Yellowjacket suit and fights Ant-Man. Ant-Man manages to swash the shrunk Yellowjacket but then the police arrests him. Yellowjacket goes to where Cassie lives but Scott manages to catch up. They fight in shrunk condition and Scott takes the risk of shrinking between the molecules to penetrate Yellowjacket's armor and tampers with the electronics. As Scott shrinks even more, he thinks of Cassie and inserts an enlarging disk into the regulator and goes back to size.
It's good that Marvel had realized that with all the other studios following their formula of a shared universe, they need more than superheroes on movies to grab viewers. By that they did a decently good effort in adding another sub-genre to the individual movies, particularly the sub-genres which have a close relevance to the superheroes' abilities or backgrounds. We saw more of a spy movie back in Captain America The Winter Soldier, a Star Wars-like space epic in Guardians of the Galaxy, and now some splashes of a heist movie in Ant- Man (2015).
The movie has the complete compulsory ingredients of a heist movie; a crew, an ace safe-cracker or conman, police interactions, double- crossing, successful and botched plans, and of course some jokes. Yes, as a heist movie Ant-Man is still a far comparison to other more focused ones. But still it's a decently nice effort to even incorporate those elements to attain the strong heist movie flavor in a superhero movie.
The action scenes are consequently littered with CGI all over. But still the movie handled the action well enough to keep it a worthy addition into the Marvel Cinematic Universe. One thing that's weird is that when the camera changes perspectives from shrunk to normal size and vice versa, the normal size view seldom offer any difference, making the transitions a little bit nagging.
The movie also faces a latent spotlight on the finale conflict setup. It doesn't offer epic scale destruction and mayhem like what we saw at Battle of Greenwich in The Dark World, or Triskelion's destruction in The Winter Soldier, or the Xandarian skies in GotG, or even the falling Sokovia in Age of Ultron. This movie's final battle instead takes place in a little girl's bedroom. The sub-atomic sequence could really explored a little bit more, or at least they could add more screen time to it. It would show up like the time journey sequence in Interstellar or 2001 A Space Oddysey.
The acting overall is just a little above standards. Paul Rudd's performance here surely isn't his best because his face doesn't really convey much emotion, and so did Evangeline Lily. Michael Douglas did well to liven his character as a mentor. Corey Stoll did well enough to make his villain character stand out, too bad there's little time in his character development.
A score of 7 out of 10 is from me for Ant-Man (2015). A recommendation is a so-so. For me it's an okay addition to MCU, and it's good that the movie has a heist movie flavor. Yet I think it could be done even better.