Krishna
Ant man? Superhero the size of an ant? Are you kidding me?
Look at the cast. Paul Rudd? The one famous for threatening to legally change his name to “Crapbag” in the final Friends season? And paired with him is the Lost heroine Evangeline Lilly?
Weird as it may seem, this thing works! Sure, there are corny scenes where Ant Man gives a nickname to one of his army of ants, a flying ant, and weeps when it dies. But overall, it is a fun movie to watch.
When Dr Hank Pym (Michael Douglass) has invented a shrinking suit and wants a person to try it on, he lands on an unlikely candidate: an ex convicted felon Scott Lang (Paul Rudd). He quit in disgust from his post at SHIELD due to a disagreement with his deputy Hank Stanley, who is trying to copy his suit to use for military purposes, which he is against. His own daughter Hope (Evangeline Lilly) stays on in an apparent betrayal of her own father’s principles.
Hank is not so clever and has several funny episodes trying to shrink a sheep.
Scott is lured into “stealing” the “treasure” in a safe by Hank, and finds nothing but a suit sitting there. Disgusted, he tries on the suit and discovers the power.
The rest of the movie is a fun romp of the good vs evil fight, which is a lot of fun to watch, as I said. There is a yellow jacket suit that Hank is designing that seems to be much more powerful than the ant suit, but earmarked to be used for evil purposes.
There is also the side story of Scott’s love for his daughter and his wife’s and her new boyfriend’s disgust over Scott’s wayward lifestyle.
There are hilarious scenes of the shrinking gone in reverse, where a giant toy train and a giant toy tank figure nicely in the movie, not to mention a giant ant.
There is the interesting idea of how he controls an entire colony of ants to do his bidding and how he recruits them all in his fight against the evil.
There are scenes where he experiences the world in ant size, with everyday objects grown to giant proportions. The scene where he first experiments with the suit in a bathtub is fantastic, as is the scene where he runs along the top of a gun, which was moments ago pointed at him.
The story does not matter: it is all a jumble of improbable superhero stuff. The movie is well done, and has a slightly self-deprecating sense of humour running through it. The slow attraction of Hope and Scott is done well and a very cinematic threat from a supernatural Yellow Jacket man (Hank) threatening Scott’s family is cliché but cute.
It gets a surprisingly high 6/10
– – Krishna