Review: Ant-Man Is Style Over Substance
- Feb 7, 2018
- 2 min read
No-one can really hate this light-hearted movie, where a man who can control ants and shrink, is recruited to take down another man who can shrink, and they end up blowing up Thomas the Tank Engine to actual size. But as fun as Ant-Man is, it truly lacks substance.
Scott Lang (Paul Rudd) is a thief who gets out of jail and falls back into crime after failing to find a job. Hank Pym (Michael Douglas) is definitely not a wife-beater, but rather a scientist-turned-superhero-turned-grouchy-retired-scientist. His old mentee Darren Cross (Corey Stoll) is about to sell the technology to the highest bidder as a weapon, so Pym recruits Lang to become the new Ant-Man and steal the tech back.
If this plot sounds simple, it's because it is. I recently saw an article describe this movie as "minimum Marvel", and it is. Every other movie truly fills up their allocated two to three hours with stuff, but this one just chugs along like a tank engine. Pym and Lang both have families in various states of disrepair - Pym is so protective of his daughter Hope (Evangeline Lilly) that it pushed her away, and Lang has been pushed away from his daughter by her step-father.
Hope's incredibly bland storyline in this movie is just jealousy and anger. She has the training, knowledge, and skills to be better than Lang as Ant-Man, but Hank can't bear to lose his daughter. Well, until the next movie when she becomes the Wasp, which begs two questions: why would Hank go to so much trouble to recruit someone else if he's just going to endanger his daughter anyway, and (more importantly, maybe) why isn't this movie just about Wasp? She is way cooler and more effective than Ant-Man, and Marvel would finally have gotten audiences off their backs about their complete lack of female-led movies.
I don't know what happened to this movie. You can certainly see Edgar Wright's influence shining through the cracks, but everything that isn't a cool or funny action sequence is just bland given the calibre that Marvel Studios is capable of.
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