Ant-Man

Ant-Man

Sometimes, “lightweight” is not a bad thing. This film is based on one of the silliest Marvel characters (the top prize goes to someone called Paste Pot Pete don’t ask) and it works because it keeps its feet almost as light as its hero’s shrunken down body. Directed by Peyton Reed (“Down With Love,” “Bring It On”) and starring Paul Rudd, it isn’t just fluffy although that would be absolutely fine so much as agile, which means that for the longest time it is the most fun you have had at any Marvel picture.

Michael Douglas has been digitally de-aged so he can stroll into an intelligence-gathering fortress in 1989 and give some of his enemies a hard stare: among those present are Tony Stark’s dad (John Slattery), still lovely in middle age Peggy Carter (so popular she gets two TV shows named after her) and new sneery dude Mitchell Carson (Martin Donovan). Hank Pym that’s Douglas’ character has something called “the Pym particle” in a red vial which SHIELD wants, with Carson being particularly insistent about it. It does not end well. That bit of history not only sets up everything that comes next but serves as nation building for the larger conceptual continuity of the MCU, which will provide all US entertainment content by 2025.

The good news is your enjoyment won’t depend on getting such jokes or references, even though there are plenty. Instead what this movie offers for most of its running time could best be described as “The Incredible Shrinking Man” meets “Rififi,” directed by Brian De Palma before he made his first “Mission Impossible” but with Jules Dassin’s goofball element put back in.

The short version: The “Pym particle” makes the Ant-Man suit work; Hank’s too old to wear it himself now but also too protective of his steely daughter Hope (Evangeline Lilly) to let her. So he recruits recently sprung from prison hacker/cat burglar Scott Lang (Rudd) for a “job” what job? The one that involves stopping megalomaniacal Darren Cross (a bald and atrociously outfitted Corey Stoll), old protégé of Pym’s, current employer of Hope’s, from making a multi billion dollar killing on a weaponized “Yellowjacket” suit that steals Pym’s technology.

The stakes are high here but not as astronomical as in most current superhero movies, where it seems like the entire planet if not the universe is at risk every time. Yes, Cross is a lunatic (playing around with this suit’s atom-manipulating capabilities can mess you up inside) and yes, he does want to build an army of Yellowjackets, and yes again, his buyer represented by sinister ex-S.H.I.E.L.D. operative Mitchell Carson (Martin Donovan) is none other than an organization called HYDRA. But this film doesn’t need to level cities to get its job done.

Streetwise Scott just wants to make it in the “straight” world so he can spend more time with his daughter; that his ex-wife now lives with a defensive cop (Bobby Cannavale) adds some dad-rivalry tensions and also some twists of plotting. And after Cross begins smelling some kind of rat in his system (it’s not a rat, actually; it’s a whole lot of telepathically controlled ants), Scott’s lovable knucklehead criminal buddies played to various shades of hilariousness by Michael Peña, T.I., and David Dastmalchian are obliged to get in on the action too.

This is a ton of stuff for any movie to handle, and it’s also contending with an insane visual effects element; different sizes of Ant-Man mean different worlds, and his interaction with ants has a trippy pop art surreality, like a pulp variation on Dali’s imagery in “The Persistence of Memory” and other insect-packed paintings. The script is credited to Edgar Wright and Joe Cornish, then Rudd and Adam McKay. Mr. Wright was originally set to direct it, and while I’m not one to play pick the authorial touches (especially after only one viewing), I suspect quite a few of the visual gags in this picture originated with his contributions.

In any case, the Reed movie offers a remarkably direct through-line; I kept waiting, in dread, for a flashback explaining how the villain got that way, but it never came; we find out what we need to know via dialogue and action, which is very nice. You never miss with this kind of thing when you’ve got people like Douglas on board: Despite its buoyancy, this movie lets us understand Cross’s evilness its gravity with an appropriate tone. It’s delightful and almost miraculous how this movie works as both a comic heist picture on an enormous scale (there’s some fabulous destruction) and a comic science-fiction picture blended into it while still adhering to the whole Marvel thing.

Even dreaded training-montage sequences unfold like compelling dance numbers here. Part of it has to do with the newness of the training not many movies show its protagonist attempting to leap through a keyhole, or get a bunch of ants to pile sugar cubes into a cup of tea but more has to do with character work from Rudd, Lilly and Douglas. Also neat is the size-matters humor that “Ant-Man” works so deftly and unpredictably there’s an iPhone centered joke in the middle of a ridiculous (in a good way) climactic action sequence that’s devilishly clever.

Like most Marvel films, “Ant-Man” has more than one ending more than two, in fact. My favorite was the second one, which will no doubt please think piece writers and/or Evangeline Lilly fans, so I’m sure you’ll hear about it soon enough. As for me, I just grinned at the final promise “Ant-Man Will Return.”

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