As I was heading out to see the movie, Ant-Man today, I was thinking I was in for just another superhero movie–and to be honest, I’m getting a bit bored with the genre. Age of Ultron was just about the last straw. It went on far too long, and not even James Spader could make that one-dimensional title character interesting.
And I’d seen the trailer for Ant-Man and it looked pretty lame. But hey, I’m a writer of speculative fiction, and if nothing else, movies like Ant-Man are kinda like homework for me. So I settled in with my bag of popcorn and prepared to be bored.
But I wasn’t. It was charming. It was fun. It was unexpected.
Paul Rudd, as the Ant-Man has always had a likable persona, so that wasn’t much of a stretch, but his smart mouth and ex-con sidekicks were GREAT and hooked me from the beginning.
Loved the scene-stealing Michael Pena’s character, ‘Luis’, as well as T. I Harris’ “Dave’, and David Dastmalchian’s ‘Kurt’. All three were set up to be stereotypical stooges, but I left the theatre wanting to see a lot more of them. And there’s a couple of terrific scenes with Anthony Mackie as Sam Wilson, the Falcon, which I will suspect will become a running gag in the future.
Evangeline Lily as ‘the girl’ started out cliche, but she and Bobby Cannaval, as Ant-Man’s ex-wife’s ass-hat fiancé both really grew on me. And for once, Michael Douglas didn’t overact (at least, not too badly).
The bad guy, Corey Stoll (as Darren Cross), while just as thinly drawn as most villains in the Marvel movies, was at least charismatic to a creepy degree. And he had a really cool costume & look.
And then there’s the ants. Antony, especially. Gotta love the ants. And like the raccoon in Guardians of the Galaxy, they worked.
Gotta give a lot of credit to the special effects for the FAST action sequences and brutal elimination of every single second that didn’t serve either character, plot, or action in the film. I highly recommend seeing it in 3-D. A ton of fun.
And the typical end note, which everyone loves about Marvel movies was one of the best evah! To my mind, the best Stan Lee cameo, too.
More Ant-Man, please.