Fish and Cherries Productions

Ant-Man is a bit of an odd duck in the Marvel Universe, but I left with an overall positive experience. The trick about this is that for the first half of the film, it feels very generic and not very Marvel. But when the second half starts and the superpowers are introduced, the movie gets both awesome and creative. All doubts about Ant-Man’s qualifications as an interesting superhero should be discarded as this movie makes the powers of shrinking and controlling ants look absolutely spectacular. It fact, they make good use of both to make some absolutely ingenious action scenes.

Unfortunately, there is a lot to gripe about in this movie. The villain is a complete cartoon character, the absolute weakest of the MCU, and is only compelling after he puts on his exosuit. The main leads also bug me, not because they’re bad, but because they feel like actors doing a performance rather than characters. In other movies, I feels that Chris Evans is Captain America or that Chris Hemsworth is Thor, but here I just see Paul Rudd putting on a suit and saying some quips, almost as if Ant-Man doesn’t have much of an identity of his own. Chemistry between them is a bit lacking too. Michael Douglas is great, but I have yet to see a role where he doesn’t pull out his charismatic best.

Like I said, it’s a fairly decent film in its own right, but I think it’s the weakest of Marvel’s Phase Two movies and probably not a good one to close out on. The box office returns make me wonder if the public isn’t starting to reach Marvel or superhero fatigue as they seem to be putting out more and more movies each year. Marvel now has half as many movies that the James Bond franchise does in 14% of the time, so maybe it might be best to ease on the brakes just a bit.