Ant-Man
/Scott Lang: My days of breaking into places and stealing shit are over! What do you need me to do?
Hank Pym: …I want you to break into a place and steal some shit.
quick fox: C- | Copper
winding dragon
Ant-Man is basically a heist film disguised as a superhero film. Hank Pym (Michael Douglas), former S.H.I.E.L.D. agent and genius physicist, hires cat burglar Scott Lang (Paul Rudd) to steal the Yellowjacket, a suit that shrinks the wearer. The Yellowjacket is based on Hank Pym’s original suit, which he gives to Scott Lang to use in the heist and become the new Ant-Man.
The problem with the film is that it doesn’t stick to its premise. It includes a really awkward and terribly scripted romance between Scott Lang and Hank Pym’s daughter, Hope van Dyne (Evangeline Lilly). It includes the weird side antics with Scott Lang’s former cellmate Luis (Michael Peña), whose comedic line attempts made me cringe most of the time. It hints at the strained relationship between Scott Lang and his family, but gives no time to develop that arc, causing the emotional build to feel contrived rather than sincere. And for all the fun things the movie did with shrinking and growing, there is actually not a whole lot of time devoted to depicting Scott Lang simply learning how to be Ant-Man. In comparison, one of the great things about Iron Man is that it highlights the progression of Tony Stark becoming one with the suit. Scott Lang basically learns how to be Ant-Man from a hammed pep talk and a three-minute montage of him running around with ants.
I actually feel kind of bad for Douglass, Rudd, and Lilly in the movie, because I can tell that all of them tried hard to make the script work. Take the scene where Hank Pym explains the death of Hope’s mother. It’s supposed to be a turning point in the relationships between the three characters, but the words spoken and the feeling behind it don’t connect. The speech Hank Pym gives doesn’t answer the initial question of why he doesn’t just allow his daughter to wear the Ant-Man (Ant-Woman?) suit, instead of dubiously and (very conveniently) finding a convicted thief to “break into a place and steal some shit.” I think the answer the scene was supposed to convey was that Hank Pym doesn’t want to risk his daughter’s life. But then, at the very end of the movie, he tells Hope that he wants her to take up her mother’s legacy as the Wasp. … What? Why didn’t he just do that at the beginning of the movie and avoid all this trouble?
There are a lot of other things that I could point out about the movie that seem to unravel in among themselves, but as it is, I feel I’m already starting to feel like I’m ranting way too much in this review. Simply put, Ant-Man has a good premise and an amazing cast, but the numerous plot holes and inability to show a coherent character progression is its undoing.