Let’s face it: Ant-Man is probably nobody’s favorite superhero. He’s not culturally iconic like Superman, ferociously badass like Wolverine or volcanic like The Hulk. Of the major superhero suffix franchises, Batman has seen seven movies and Spider-Man has enjoyed five before poor little Ant-Man has finally scurried onto the Silver Screen.
Perhaps the wait, however, has less to do with popularity than it does technology. With CGI growing ever more sophisticated every year—every month, probably—the convincing portrayal of a man who can shrink to the size of an insect is now well within the capabilities of the Hollywood dream factory. “Ant-Man” is one of the most formally imaginative of the Marvel movies thus far, and it’s never better than when its titular hero is reduced to the size of a lint ball, hurtling through a suddenly dangerous world where bathtub faucets emit tsunami-like waves, where rats tower over interior cubbyholes like sentinels, and where a tabletop mock-up in somebody’s office becomes a war zone of destructive possibility.
Shot like a live-action Pixar adventure, “Ant-Man” finds its hero dodging the spiked heels of clubgoers, clinging to the ridges of a spinning record, navigating a sewer system and riding precariously on the carapace of a flying ant. And that’s just in Ant-Man’s trial run: Just wait until he goes “subatomic,” and the movie takes on the trippy abstraction of “2001: A Space Odyssey.”
But before we get there, we need a requisite origin story, and the movie’s writers— Edgar Wright, Joe Cornish, Adam McKay and Paul Rudd—have borrowed elements from the Ant-Man comic book series to conceive a touching, if familiar, narrative about second chances. Rudd plays Scott Lang, an ex-convict who served time for the most noble of crimes in 21st century America: corporate whistleblowing-turned-burglary. His criminal record prevents him from keeping even menial jobs, however, which means he’s unable to pay child support or even to visit his beloved daughter Cassie (Abby Ryder Fortson).
He’s a man with nothing to lose and everything to gain, which is why he’s lured back into crime—in this case, cracking the safe of retired physicist Hank Pym (Michael Douglas), who happens to be looking for a person stealthy enough to break through his security system and discover the safe’s contents: the Ant-Man suit which, with its capacity to shrink and expand its wearer, Pym developed for national defense decades earlier amid the global panic of the Cold War. Pym needs a new Ant-Man.
The science of it all is fairly ridiculous—some gobbledygook about changing the distance between atoms—but like everything else in this gonzo comedy, we accept it because it’s so wittily, even ingeniously presented. We also overlook the one-dimensional villain, a slimy suit named Darren Cross (Casey Stoll), who aims to replicate Pym’s formula for—what else?—world domination.
The story doesn’t matter when the movie’s breezy tone and spirit are so gloriously spot-on. The Avengers films are at their best when they’re convivially jokey, but this entire movie feels like an extended joke, and its lack of self-seriousness sets it apart. Rudd, who has worked with cowriter Adam McKay on the “Anchorman” movies, plays Lang/Ant-Man as just another Paul Rudd everyman, absent the usual superhero ego. “I fought an Avenger, and I didn’t get killed!” he says, with the glee of a 10-year-old. (Don’t worry; I won’t spoil that hilarious cameo).
Even when the movie accedes to the usual ear-splitting procession of exploded buildings, gun-wielding standoffs and aerial fistfights, it never loses its sense of humor, always finding time for a brilliant visual gag pertaining to the scale of an object. At one point, Ant-Man and Yellowjacket, Darren Cross’ alter ego, are tussling inside a briefcase as it plummets from a helicopter, trading fisticuffs on and around a now-massive iPhone. Yellowjacket happens to rub against the smartphone while threatening Ant-Man about his imminent disintegration, and Siri takes this as a command to play “Disintegration” by The Cure. Something tells me you won’t encounter a gag like that in “Batman vs. Superman.”
