Antman Review

Marvel has been nothing but successful over the past couple years releasing hit movie after hit movie. They’re on somewhat of a winning streak. They’ve even started creating super hero movies based on other genres like Captain America: The Winter Soldier’s political thriller and Guardians of the Galaxy’s space opera. They followed both of those successes with the epic Avengers: Age of Ultron this summer. Its so fitting that they follow up their biggest film with their smallest in Antman; a heist movie at heart. If you’ve been following along, I wasn’t too thrilled about the trailers. Read my Antman review below to see how I liked the final film.

The Story

My favorite thing about this movie is its scale. So many comic book movies have such high stakes. The world is usually in the balance. The guardians rescued and entire galaxy, Cap brought down a tremendously powerful government organizations and Ultron would have wiped out the whole earth if he got his way. Scott Lang’s story is essentially about family though. The much smaller scale make this a much more personal story, and that’s a great thing.

The Characters

I won’t claim to truly have ever been a fan of any version of Antman or Giant Man. I have though enjoyed the contributions he’s made to the Avengers team. With that said, Paul Rudd was great and really likable in this role and the suit looked perfect. His thief buddies also added the perfect amount of comic relief. Michael Douglass and Evangeline Lilly but did a great job in their roles as Hank Pymm and Hope Van-Dyne as well.

The biggest problem is one that has plagued so many Marvel movies before this one. It has a tremendously average villain. A hero can only be as good as his villain in most instances, and yellow jacket doesn’t do much to help things. His motivations for becoming evil are questionable, he’s just a carbon-copy of our hero and he’s just way too whiney in general. He’s definitely in my bottom three so far for Marvel villains.

The Action

The action and special effects in Antman are another good change of pace. It was trippy watching our hero going from normal to bug-sized and back again. Action scenes shown from bug perspective look massive and epic, then the camera pans out and you see it what they look like from a human perspective. Its always the opposite of epic, which usually breaks up the tension and provides a little comic relief.

The Verdict

A lot of non-comic book fans drew the line at Antman amid the onslaught of superhero movies in recent years and decided to pass on Scott Lang’s adventure. Those people are missing out. While not perfect but any means, Marvel’s smallest film to date is funny, action-packed and well written. This isn’t the one to sit out.

Rating

Good

7