If I’d been told someone connected with Marvel movies would be saying, “Sorry, sorry!” this summer, I would have guessed it would be Joss Whedon talking about “Age of Ultron.” But instead it’s “Ant-Man,” apologetically beating the tar out of a guy and showing he’s a refreshingly reluctant superhero.
Paul Rudd — the kind of schlump you can imagine getting fired by Baskin-Robbins but also hacking an impregnable tech company — turns out to be an ideal choice to play Scott Lang, a good-guy cat burglar recruited by a prickly scientist (Michael Douglas) to use a shrinking gizmo that will reduce him to the size of an ant and give him amazing strength.
Much as in “Iron Man,” the scientist, Dr. Hank Pym, has a rivalry with a more diabolical tech genius (Corey Stoll) who is on the verge of duplicating the shrink-suit but plans to use it for world domination via a different insect: He’s Yellowjacket-Man. Someone needs to open up a can of whoop-ass on this guy, or at least a can of Raid.
Rudd, who co-wrote the script with three others, takes care to establish Scott as an endearing loser who hangs out with three other lovable crooks and needs a job to win back visitation rights to his daughter. Much less arrogant and quippy than other Marvel characters (and nearly everyone in “Age of Ultron”), he carries a major tactical advantage: He’s vulnerable. He’s the only superhero who risks not only getting shot, but stepped on. Much of the (limitless) boredom of “Ultron” came from the sense that everything came too easily.
“Ant-Man” is at its best in the establishing scenes and in the middle, when Scott learns how to operate the shrink suit — you can get small and then revert to normal size at the touch of a button — and how to work with the other ants who take electromagnetic direction from Pym. To fight, he learns from Pym’s daughter Hope (Evangeline Lilly), who calls him “Princess” while she’s belting him. Unfortunately for her, the four (dudes) who wrote the script evidently thought, “We’ll make her an ass-kicker!” was both original and sufficient to define her.
Watching Ant-Man in action is a lot of fun, though; his practical invisibility means director Peyton Reed (“Bring It On,” “The Break-Up”) can stage action with the wit of the Quicksilver scenes in “X-Men: Days of Future Past.” One such scene involves a surprise confrontation with an Avenger, whose group Pym has broken with because of a feud with Ironman’s father.
Closer in spirit to sci-fi movies like “The Fly,” and to heist flicks, than to the lesser superhero spectacles and their obsession with selling tickets to low-attention-span teens, “Ant-Man” depends much less on meaningless fighting and destruction and much more on playful imagination. The humor is organic, not like Whedon’s forced jocularity. One “Ant-Man” crisis involves merely surviving a bathtub filling with water and getting tossed onto a turntable at a dance club.
The love story between Scott and Pym’s daughter is an afterthought, while the climactic third act is a bit too easy — it seems to take longer to explain how to break into the tech firm than to actually do so. But the film never flags. To find a smarter bug-man saga, you’d have to go back to “The Metamorphosis.” I was far from sold on insect superheroes, but now I say: Bring on Cockroach Chick.