This is the first of the Marvel Cinematic Universe films that I'd seriously considered not watching in the cinema. Ever since Edgar Wright left the director's seat, it had been plagued by rumors of production problems. When it was first released, its critic ratings were awful and people were eager to call it Marvel's first real stumble, though ratings have slowly climbed up since then. Plus, let's face it, Ant-Man isn't exactly the most inspiring of superheroes as even the actor who plays him, Paul Rudd, admitted.

What changed my mind was reading the initial impressions on Broken Forum. Not everyone liked it but those who did praised it for telling a more human-scale story without the need for save-the-world stakes. Considering how much I disliked the second Avengers, this sounded right up my alley. Indeed, I ended up liking this quite a bit more than that movie. I'm especially pleased with how, just as The Winter Soldier was essentially a 1970s spy thriller in superhero dressing, this one is a heist movie with superpowers.

All heist movies start by introducing the crew needed to pull off the job, so appropriately enough this one opens with Scott Lang, a burglar, being released from prison. What's more is that there are actually two crews from entirely different milieus here, one made up of Lang's penal friends, and the other made up of Hank Pym, who as all Marvel fans know was the original Ant-Man, and his daughter Hope Van Dyne, who as far as I know was a villain in the comics. The mission is to infiltrate the company that Pym himself founded and steal its technology to prevent it from falling into the wrong hands.

Shrinking characters aren't exactly new in cinema and they're not really new in superheroes either (remember the Misfits of Science?) Still I believe that this is the first time it has been given the big budget action movie treatment and for me at least, it clicks together perfectly. Its not just the scenes of a miniaturized Ant-Man navigating a giant's world, cool as they are with the perspective special effects used here. I loved how the shrinking powers are tightly integrated into the fights and liberally used, creating a new visual dynamic. The scene with the Falcon is a great example of this though I feel sorry for him for how his wings are destroyed in every film he appears in. I also loved how the infiltration process allowed audiences to see exciting displays of superpowers outside of the context of combat.

By being a smaller movie, Ant-Man manages to be not quite as dumb, and that makes a big difference to me. It's not perfectly watertight; shorting out the servers seems pointless when you're already planning to blow up the whole building and I don't quite understand why Pym has been watching Lang for years. But it sure makes more sense than the new Avengers movie and I think Cross even makes for a more credible villain, even if he is less spectacular. For once, it even makes sense why Lang is doing this instead of the more well-known heroes and I especially loved how the film makes clear that Hope Van Dyne is better in every way than Lang is, but Pym insists on using Lang only because he is expendable. The movie even manages to poke fun at the idea that superpowered fights must necessarily be epic by intercutting shots of how harmless the toys being tossed around look.

Finally any write-up of this movie would be remiss if it didn't mention Michael Peña who steals every scene he appears in. I have to admit that the humor here isn't terribly sophisticated but I got pretty much all of the jokes here and that's enough for me. I'm sad to say that the cinema hall I watched this in was far from full and it appears that Ant-Man isn't doing as well financially as the other MCU films. But I'm happy to report that pretty much everyone in the cinema chuckled along with the jokes.

Anyway this film does so many little things well that it's impossible to mention them all (casting Michael Douglas to lend it some heft, adding a new superheroine into the MCU, referencing the Microverse etc.) It's not a top tier MCU movie and of course it's still just a superhero action movie with all of the eye-rolling that entails, but I'd put as a solidly entertaining movie that punches above its weight. As George R.R. Martin recently commented on his own blog, director Peyton Reed should be proud of achieving a stellar balance between story, character, humor and action. Most of all, it proves that the Marvel formula of inserting superheroes into other genres still works and I'd love to see more of it. Maybe we'll get a rom-com next?

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