Ed's Review Dot Com

Marvel Studios,

Paul Rudd, Evangeline Lilly, Corey Stoll, Bobby Cannavale, Michael Peña, Judy Greer, T.I., David Dastmalchian, Wood Harris, Michael Douglas

Scott Lang (Paul Rudd) is just getting out of prison, and he misses his daughter. He’s determined to go straight, but he shortly finds that his ex-wife Maggie (Judy Greer) and her new guy, cop Paxton (Bobby Cannavale) and those who might give him a regular job, don’t get along very well with ex-cons. So out of desperation, Scott is convinced to try one last heist. But he’s been tricked into crossing paths with scientist Hank Pym (Michael Douglas) who needs his help to fight the guy who ran Dr. Pym from the company he founded and has tried to steal his technology that could turn a human into a tiny creature, the size of an ant. With inside help from his daughter Hope (Evangeline Lilly) he’s able to convince Scott to redeem himself by turning himself into Ant-Man and trying to save the world.

Marvel has surely been on a roll. There is no doubt they are hitting home run after home run. Ant-Man is certainly a risk for them, but one that paid off highly. First of all, what about the history? Dr. Pym was Ant-man along with his wife who was The Wasp. But now Pym is on the sidelines. How can they cover that up? Furthermore, with all the other highly successful characters in this franchise, bring the Ant-Man is a risk, and then assigning it to Paul Rudd to carry is ludicrous. Well, I don’t know if the magic of Stan Lee or if these Disney/Marvel guys are just that brilliant, but they certainly pulled it off. Now this is not really the best of all the new Marvel movies, but it’s a damn good one just the same. Paul Rudd has the right degree of nice guy mixed with screw-up, laced with a little bit of bad ass to handle this, and this is perhaps the best performance of his career. He did an excellent job. The story is really fresh and brand new. Now, granted, evil genius who takes over the corporation and tries to sell the weapons of world domination to the highest bidder isn’t new, but the battles and encounters between the good guys and the bad guys is really well done. Scott has a bumbling group of buddies who create a lot of comedy as well, led by Michael Peña who was simply fabulous in this film. The time flies as we have so much fun, and everyone is so well cast. The action is extremely well done, and the CGI is blended in so well that you can hardly recognize that it’s not really happening in front of your eyes. I was blessed to see this in Digital Extreme size (not quite Imax, but a good challenger), in 3-D. The 3-D was smooth and also seamless so that you could hardly notice it, but it really added to the enjoyment of the movie. All in all, this is a must see for the summer. It’s the best I have seen so far, although there is some stiff competition yet to come.

EdG – EdsReview Dot Com – A Movie Review Blog