Ant-Man
Director: Peyton Reed
Stars: Paul Rudd,
Michael Douglas, Corey Stoll, Evangeline Lilly
Ant-Man
was a little different than the other Marvel movies. I certainly don’t mean to say that this is an entirely bad addition to Marvel’s
ever-expanding cinematic universe—it just felt different.
Ant-Man is a superhero origin story that begins with the release of a prisoner, Scott Lang
(Rudd). Lang struggles to find work on the outside, since he's considered a
felon—a cat burglar, to be more exact. When the struggle to find a job becomes
too much, Lang falls back into old habits and expertly burgles the house of Dr.
Hank Pym (Douglas), a scientist who allegedly worked on shrinking technology
that reduces the space between atoms. Upon breaking into Pym’s vault, he
discovers a red suit, and, being the curious type—fitting for a cat burglar, I
suppose—Lang puts on the suit and becomes the Ant-Man. Pym’s former assistant,
Darren Cross (Stoll), and Pym’s Daughter, Hope (Lilly), are working on that
same shrinking technology, however. Cross develops a suit—named the
Yellowjacket—that has the same atom-shrinking abilities, though he sees his
weaponized suit as one that will end all wars and make him rich in the process.
Lang, Hank, and Hope team up to take down the Yellowjacket to stop the shrinking technology from falling into the hands of the military.
With Ant-Man
coming out after the massive release of Avengers:
Age of Ultron, it seems like this movie isn’t getting nearly as much hype despite a good amount of advertising.
A big part of that is most likely that people like me—people who haven’t read
the Marvel comic books—aren’t really sure who Ant-Man is. Iron Man is a huge
Marvel character who’s had several movies already, and the same goes for Thor,
Hulk, and Captain America. Even before their movies came out, though, I could
tell you who each of those characters was, but Ant-Man? I’d never even heard of
him before. I think that’s how a solid chunk of movie-goers are going to react
to this movie.
Being released after Age
of Ultron isn’t going to do Ant-Man
any favors, either. With the massive blockbuster success of the second
installment of The Avengers, it’s
almost like getting sloppy seconds with Ant-Man.
Age of Ultron was talked about
extensively, and there was a decent-sized advertising campaign, which probably
led to its $191 million opening weekend. According to the Internet Movie Database,
Ant-Man pulled in just $57 million in
its opening weekend. Again, I’m sure there were plenty of avid Marvel fans who
have all the comic books lining up at the doors for Ant-Man, but for the average fair-weather Marvel fan like me, I
wasn’t really sure what I was getting into.
Like I said when I started, Ant-Man isn’t entirely a bad movie—it’s just different. With Peyton Reed in
the director’s seat, I remember a little bit of backlash from the
fanbase. Age of Ultron’s director,
Joss Whedon, is known for quick-witted dialogue between his characters (just look
at his cult television series Firefly) That sharp-tongued humor seems like a good fit for the Marvel cinematic universe if we take anything from the Iron Man movies as well as Guardians of the Galaxy. With Ant-Man, it seems like they were stretching that humor pretty thin.
There were funny parts throughout the movie, but none of them seemed as
raucously funny as Age of Ultron was.
The biggest stretch for humor was the inclusion of Lang’s bumbling
crime-buddies who help him set up the heist of Pym’s house. They were a little
too slapstick for my taste, and I was a little disappointed that that same
level of quick-witted humor wasn’t in this movie. I think the biggest laugh I
got was from Stan Lee’s cameo.
My one big complaint was
Ant-Man’s villain, Darren Cross/Yellowjacket. I get it: 99% of
superhero movies dwell on the “good vs. evil” idea, and Ant-Man isn’t an outlier. Yellowjacket is just a foil to
Ant-Man in this regard, and neither Yellowjacket nor Cross really get that much character development
throughout the whole movie. Hank explains early on that a biological organism
must be protected by a special suit when going through the shrinking process,
lest the suit’s fuel start fiddling with the chemistry of the organism’s brain.
From Cross’s first scene, we already know that he’s the bad guy, since he’s
trying to use this astounding technology (A) as a weapon and (B) to make
himself stinking rich. I was really miffed as to why the director didn’t flesh
out this brain chemistry thing—Hank brings up this idea to Cross just before
Cross dons the Yellowjacket outfit, but it seemed too little, too late at that
point. Even if there was one quick sequence of Cross using the shrinking
technology that tried to show the audience how it altered his mental state, it would have
felt less like a loose end while also giving this character more (much
needed) depth. I thought Graeme McMillan summed up the issues with
Marvel’s villains pretty well in this article.
Will I be rushing out to pick up a copy of Ant-Man when it comes out on blu-ray?
Probably not, but it might be nice to have a Marvel movie collection one day. Was it still an enjoyable movie? Sure, if you’re in the mood for
a generic villain who you won’t remember once the credits roll.
Now for some house-keeping. I’d like to write here more than
I do now, but I don’t have the means to go to the movies on a weekly basis at roughly
$15 a pop. Therefore, I’m going to write posts about random movies I find and
title it “Movies from Yesteryear.” There are plenty of movies on Netflix and
Amazon Prime that I simply haven’t gotten to yet, and when they originally came
out in theaters, I thought, “Wow, that’d be cool to write about.” Then they
went out of theaters, and I completely forgot about them…until now! Hopefully,
by writing about all movies and not just new releases, it’ll give me a little
more fodder. Have any other ideas? Let me know!
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