Review of Ant-Man

Ant-Man picks up the MCU humor ball right where Guardians put it down

You’re not going to believe this, but I just watched Ant-Man three times in as many days. This is what happens when I rent things on Amazon.

This was awesome. Not perfect, not quite The Winter Soldier, but awesome. What it did, which is so important to the Avengers franchise is it continued the humor the Guardians started the year prior. Thor 2 sucked all the air out of the room, but the MCU was saved by the Winter Soldier. And then came Guardians of the Galaxy, so far out of left field, I didn’t even know it was part of the Avengers franchise until the ads for Infinity War (yeah, I was behind). It was funny, it played with tone, it was impossible to imagine this gang of misfits sharing a scene with Thor. And then Age of Ultron brought back the regular mood of the franchise. Great, but it appeared as though Guardians would be the exception.

NOPE! They boldly put Paul Rudd in charge of the next installment of the MCU. And not just Rudd, but Michael Pena. His character is like no other in the Avengers universe. The two scenes of him explaining how he got his intel alone make the movie worth watching. It had the typical Marvel story – save the world by defeating the bad guys trying to use the tech they have for bad things like war and killing children. But it does it with humor – a different kind of humor than we’re used to from the MCU (again, I didn’t know about Guardians yet). The way they juxtaposed the seriousness of the situation with the miniscule stature of the players involved (when the briefcase landed in the pool, and more notably when the toy train derailed) was a golden opportunity they most certainly did not miss.

Yes, the concept is interesting. Shrinking the distance between atoms. OK, that’s easy enough to understand. That’s why he can hit with the power of a large man. But then wouldn’t he weigh the same as a large man? Because last time I tried to ride an ant, it didn’t go so well. Maybe they should have made it harder to understand so we wouldn’t figure out that plot hole. Kind of like the whole “going subatomic” thing. Not even Neil deMovieRuiner Tyson went anywhere near that.

Major plot holes aside, this was a fun movie. Maybe not quite as good the third day in a row, but still awesome.

7 bugs/10

Dustin Fisher