Review: Ant-Man

First off, it is impossible while watching Ant-Man from Marvel Studios without thinking of what Edgar Wright's film would have been. Since his departure, director Payton Reed has stepped in to finish the film along Marvel's commands. Wright's stamp is seen only in flashes but it is easy to see what his version would have gone for. Instead we are treated to a conventional and generic, if not entertaining, comic book film that feels like a hodgepodge of every other Marvel film.

Paul Rudd plays Lang, a cat burglar recently out from a stint in jail for nobley returning stolen money to people by hacking a large company. Lang finds himself lured back to crime by his friend Luis (a funny but underused Michael Peña). During a routine heist, Lang find the Ant-Man suit instead of money. Thus he gets propelled into a story involving Dr. Hank Pym(Michael Douglas) who invented the suit and is trying to keep the technology out of the wrong hands. His daughter(Evangeline Lilly) helps along they way but rarely gets to rise above her cold bitch hairdo.

Rudd is talented and refreshing screen presence with amazing comic timing. Here, much like Chris Pratt in Jurassic World, he is rendered flat in order to play the traditional leading man type. Ant-Man has so many chances to be unique and weird and Rudd is the biggest missed opportunity for the film to take a risk. However Marvel seems content on churning out more of the same, they have 12 or so films already in the works.

Ant-Man is mildly entertaining for most of its running time with some flashes of wit and daring. Marvel has taken a relatively unknown comic book hero and done its damndest to fit him into the Avengers storyline. It doesn't really work here and each time you can see the threads being sewn into the larger story that is planned, taking you out of the immediate story. Generic but never dull, Ant-Man will satisfy some but left me wishing for a more imaginative version.

3/5