Ant-Man review – where the bold meets the bland

For years, this oddball addition to the ever-expanding Marvel movie universe range was slated for direction by Edgar Wright, with a script co-written by fellow Brit Joe Cornish. But when Wright and Marvel parted company in May 2014, leading man Paul Rudd undertook a late-in-the-day rewrite with Anchorman alumnus Adam McKay, while Yes Man’s Peyton Reed stepped into the director’s chair.

Unsurprisingly, the resulting film looks like a bodge, torn between the quirkiness of Wright and Cornish’s original vision and the more blandly mainstream sensibilities of its ultimate key players. Rudd is ex-con Scott Lang, jailed for a lovably anti-corporate crime, now struggling to hold down a job and reconnect with his estranged daughter (yes, it’s Ant-erstellar, in more ways than one).

Breaking into the home of anti-tech originator Dr Hank Pym (Michael Douglas), Scott purloins a suit that shrinks his body but magnifies his strength, making him the perfect weapon for an insect-fuelled raid on the laboratories of corporate creep Darren Cross (Corey Stoll).

While the protagonists of films such as The Incredible Shrinking Man and Fantastic Voyage endured long-term diminution, Ant-Man nips nimbly back and forth between sizes, often within the space of a single leap. It’s a peculiar superpower of which the film never quite gets the measure: bath-tub terrors and in-briefcase battles are kooky fun, but action sequences in which Scott mounts flying insects smack of Richard Burton riding the wings of a locust in Exorcist II: The Heretic.

The movie needs to be a lot stranger to pull this stuff off – less Scott Lang, more Scott Pilgrim. Instead, we’re left pondering how much less engaging Rudd is than Robert Downey Jr, and how much more we laughed at the properly peculiar Guardians of the Galaxy. Not so f-ant-astic, then, just a little ant-iclimatic.