Ant-Man Review

The best thing about this film is scale, in both senses. After a run of city leveling finales, here is a picture whose climax happens in a child's bedroom, where a train is destroyed in slow motion and then revealed as a toy, and the joke is also the thesis. Reed shoots the shrinking sequences with real invention, a bathtub becoming an ocean, a spinning record becoming a landscape, a quantum passage that is the closest this franchise has come to genuine psychedelia. Paul Rudd's easy decency makes a burglar likeable without softening him, Michael Pena's rambling secondhand flashbacks are the funniest running gag in the entire run, and Michael Douglas gives Hank Pym a persuasive old man's bitterness.

The film's problems are inherited ones. Darren Cross is another evil businessman in an evil version of the hero's suit, a template the studio had already worn out twice, and the compromise between Edgar Wright's departed version and the finished picture leaves the tone lurching between deadpan caper and standard issue origin story. Even so, the modesty is a virtue and the film plainly knows it.