Ant-Man

Our Review

The little heist movie that survived its own production chaos. Edgar Wright developed it for a decade and left over creative differences months before shooting, and Peyton Reed stepped in and kept the script’s heart: a cat burglar trying to earn back his daughter’s respect by robbing the world’s strangest vault. Paul Rudd, who shares a story credit, plays Scott Lang as the everyman the franchise never had, an ex con with a master’s degree in sizing.

The shrinking action is the draw. The bathtub dive, the falling between vinyl grooves in a fight set to a disco track, the finale inside a child’s bedroom where a Thomas the Tank Engine becomes a weapon of mass destruction: the movie keeps finding new comedy inside the power set. Michael Douglas classes up the whole enterprise as Hank Pym, and Evangeline Lilly’s Hope gets the sharper fight choreography and a decade of justified resentment.

Corey Stoll’s Yellowjacket is the standard forgettable suit mirror villain, a Marvel formula slot filled on schedule, and the heist crew, led by Michael Pena’s gloriously rambling tip monologues, outshines the plot they service.

Lightweight by design and better for it. Our score: 7/10.