Ant-Man Is A Perfect Pisstake Of Marvel's Overblown Superhero Epics

14 July 2015 | 11:02 am | Anthony Carew

"The screenplay happily riffs on the tropes of the heist movie — in numerous merry montages — and conceives of itself as a comedy."

“I think our first step should be calling The Avengers,” says Paul Rudd, in winking quasi-joke, when he’s handed the great power —and great responsibility — of trying on the Ant-Man suit once worn by Michael Douglas’s grey scientist. It’s one of many moments in Ant-Man where you’re reminded, with sledgehammer subtlety, that the super-hero movie you’re watching is no standalone picture, but mere piece of a larger jigsaw; those period times when the dictates of the Cinematic Universe lean on the actual drama.

Douglas has his reasons for not involving Marvel’s A-Team — Stark Enterprises being morally-questionable military-industrial goons, chiefly — but, essentially, he waves off the lack of top-shelf intellectual properties with this gag: “they’re probably too busy dropping cities from the sky.”

You’re reminded, with sledgehammer subtlety, that the super-hero movie you’re watching is no standalone picture, but mere piece of a larger jigsaw.

This second one-liner lands far better, because, in its own way, it seems like a criticism of the Bigger, Louder, More Destructive maxim that normally powers super-hero movies. The impossibly-inflated stakes of The Age Of Ultron — sentient computer threatening imminent apocalypse — deserve to be mocked, its villainous threat going far beyond all realms of plausibility or likelihood. If nothing else, the MCU demands an Earth, still, to exist as home-base for its infinite imminent ‘phases’, robbing its biggest title of any theoretical day-saving drama.

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The best thing about Ant-Man, in contrast, is its play on scale. Not just in its vivid visual rendering of worlds miniature and microscopic — drains and ducts, shag carpets and grass, psychedelic sub-atomic particles in an Interstellar-esque plunge into theoretical physics — but in its own self-aware smallness. Its funniest, most incisive moments take the overblownitis of Marvel myth-making and make it absurd comedy.

The climactic fight scene finds Rudd, as Ant-Man, duking it out with Carey Stoll’s villain, who hits the ground evil-mad-scientist-who-indiscriminately-kills-underlings and swiftly turns into Rudd’s insect-sized rival, Yellowjacket. The two do all the regular climactic-super-hero-movie-fight stuff — fire lasers, stand atop moving vehicles, topple buildings, wipe out whole scenic backdrops — but they do so on a toy train set; director Peyton Reed oft cutting away, comically, to show the miniature scale of all this carnage, just how little destruction his film is causing.

In this way, Ant-Man takes what could be a curse — its status as MCU B-Movie — and fashions it into something resembling a blessing. It’s weird to frame a $130mil blockbuster as anything ‘modest’, but compared to the routine overblown bloat of regular Marveldom, there’s something pleasing about the fact it isn’t threatening an extinction level event.

Instead, the screenplay happily riffs on the tropes of the heist movie — in numerous merry montages — and conceives of itself as a comedy: Rudd’s rag-tag gang of low-rent crims a trio of comic caricatures headlined by a veritably silly turn by Michael Peña. This screenplay is chiefly the work of Edgar Wright and Joe Cornish, and whilst we’ll never know how a wholly Cornetto’d Ant-Man would’ve turned out, Wright’s late-in-production removal from the director’s chair hasn’t proven to be fatal.

Rudd’s twinkle-eyed, aw-shucks charm isn’t exactly the greatest fit for a super-hero movie, but he helps sell both the PG gags and the plainly-manipulative doing-it-for-my-daughter emotional hook. His anti-hero is lured into a life of death-defying derring-do by Douglas and his dangerous-dame daughter Evangeline Lily, who spends the various training montages rolling her eyes from under her gleaming black bob.

The story beats are all plenty predictable — Stoll eventually goes plum crazy, Lily eventually turns love interest, Rudd earns fatherhood penance, Anthony Mackie’s Black Falcon drops by just to say ‘hi’, there’s a ticking clock countdown — and the results are, really, merely adequate. But not every super-hero movie needs shoot for the stars; sometimes it’s enough to just be two hours of non-threatening time-killing.