2.5 stars. Rated PG-13, for action violence and some rather nasty peril
By Derrick Bang
Well, it was inevitable: Mighty
Marvel finally stumbled.
This film’s problems are
numerous, but the largest issue is one of tone; director Peyton Reed,
apparently adopting 1989’s Honey, I
Shrunk the Kids as his template, has emphasized slapstick sight gags and
comic relief supporting characters to a point that pretty well destroys any of
this story’s potential drama.
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| Scott Lang (Paul Rudd, center) listens attentively as Hank Pym (Michael Douglas) explains the many hazards likely to be encountered during a clandestine assault on his own company's research labs. For these reasons and many others, Hank's daughter, Hope (Evangeline Lilly), believes Scott wholly wrong for the task. |
The nadir is a climactic duel to
the death between miniscule characters, which takes place within a child’s
tabletop train set: a sequence that absolutely, positively doesn’t work on any
level. And then, just to make a bad idea even worse, Reed punctuates this clash
with an unexpectedly gigantic Thomas the Tank Engine, its enormous plastic eyes
bouncing back and forth in dismay.
Just as mine were doing.
Reed’s sledge-hammer efforts at
comedy are bothersome, but — in fairness — he can’t be blamed for trying to
make the best of a bad situation. Ant-Man
has been a troubled production for years, during a lengthy gestation in the
hands of British writer/director Edgar Wright (Shaun of the Dead and The
World’s End, among others), whose sly, subversive brand of humor certainly
would have been better than what we wound up with here.
But the project was ripped from
his hands at the last moment, the script subsequently re-written by Adam McKay
and star Paul Rudd. McKay is responsible for numerous Will Ferrell projects,
notably Anchorman: The Legend of Ron
Burgundy and its sequel, Talladega
Nights: The Ballad of Ricky Bobby and this year’s Get Hard. I submit that Ferrell’s favorite scripter can’t, by
definition, be right for anything taking place in Marvel’s ambitious film
universe.
So: What were Marvel and Disney
thinking?
Rudd’s meddlesome hand is equally
evident. The star clearly shaped the script to fit the insufferable smugness
that has become his go-to screen persona, rather than — as always should be the case — modulating his
performance to suit the character’s needs. But the latter undoubtedly would
require a level of acting beyond Rudd’s capabilities, and thus we’re stuck with
his usual lackadaisical swanning from one scene to the next.
Rudd simply doesn’t seem to care about this character, or indeed the
entire film. Ergo, why should we?
The core story follows the broad
strokes established during several decades in the Marvel comic book universe,
with genius scientist Hank Pym (Michael Douglas) having perfected a process
that allows him to shrink to ant-size, while maintaining his molecular density
in order to (among other things) deliver full-strength punches. Along the way,
he also developed the means to communicate with ants, and thus can command
massive insect armies to help take out nefarious villains in his guise as
Ant-Man.
But all that was years ago. Wary
of the military applications contemplated by Howard Stark (John Slattery) and
his weasel corporate associate Mitchell Carson (Martin Donovan, suitably
smarmy), Pym retreats into seclusion. And since Ant-Man’s brief “career”
remained under the public radar, the very notion of such a superhero has become
little more than an urban myth.
