4 out of 5

Directed by: Peyton Reed

Ah, good, we CAN still have fun.  I don’t think we’re unaligned on the notion that the individual Marvel movies are proving more enjoyable than the Avengers flicks.  The team pictures are good for the spectacle, but they can’t help but amount to typical blockbuster structure.  And despite the bashing producer Kevin Feige took with being too much of a House-style enforcer when Edgar Wright departed this flick, Ant-Man proves that these one offs are definitely the place to go to get a bit more personality.  And fun.  Avengers 2 wasn’t exactly grim and gritty, but it was world-explodin’ stuff.  Same with the last round of Cap and Thor pics.  GotG had an underdog appeal to it, and overall was a more original flick than AM, but due to its setting, it was definitely a bit out there, and so got to revel in fantasy as much as gay ol’ time stuff.  But Ant-Man is pretty much distilled enjoyment.  It gathers its resources well over its runtime for a satisfying payoff, and leaves us with a trail of fun montages and entertaining characters along the way.  And it’s not scared to -really- be an underdog in the relative mundanity of its setting: that Hank Pym (Douglas) wants to hire thief Scott Lang (Rudd) to stop rival scientist Darren Cross (Stoll) from using his Ant-Man (shrinking) formula for, y’know, weapons and other bad things.  The “weapons used for evil purposes” can be grown to a larger sized plot, a la Iron Man, but director Peyton Reed and the several credited screenwriters keep it localized here between Pym, Lang, and Cross, and it makes the hijinx much more manageable and approachable.  Shrinking dude isn’t exactly the most mind-blowing hero, after all, so it’s nice that for this initial film foray they kept the scope down.  And Reed, from a comedic film background, proves to be perfect for the action comedy mix: the comic book stylings of the Marvel U are sensibly served well by someone with good visual timing, which is certainly a requirement for both physical and verbal comedy.  He also delivers a truly stunning – for the reserve in its representation – surreal moment late in the film that you know is coming and you wonder how it’s going to be represented.  Most films, especially those trying to make money in the mainstream, would drum up this section with more graspable effects, but Reed lets it trail out rather minimally, and it makes the scene that much more effective in the midst of the action sequence in which it occurs.

The movie does take its time in getting to its concluding heist, which, while this isn’t a bad thing structurally, as it was a smart play to build up non-heroic Lang into a guy we can believe would be the right choice for the job, it allows for some dialogue stretches which aren’t exactly mind-blowing.  These are not nuanced characters.  There are talented actors, though, who gel well, and Rudd and Reed drop snark into a scene at just the right moments to keep us going.

Which is essentially the overall summary of the film: it knows how to keep it going.  It knows how to play this type of movie to our expectations, and it knows how to once again prove that the MCU can expand to encompass the second-tier heroes incredibly well, as long as the featured flicks are up to the same fun standards as this one.