"Ant-Man" isn’t short on fun

The “Heist” movie.  What an under-served film genre.  Some of the most exciting action/thrillers in film history fall under the “heist movie” heading. Most recently, folks would probably name the Clooney/Pitt Ocean’s Eleven (and Twelve… and Thirteen) flicks, but there are also such entries as Stanley Kubrick’s The Killing, Michael Mann’s Heat, and the original Italian Job (although the remake wasn’t awful, either).  When Marvel’s chief of production Kevin Fiege announced all those months ago that Ant-Man would be Marvel’s “heist” movie, my interest was piqued.  Sure, it’s the next installment in the ongoing Marvel Cinematic Universe series, so I’d have gotten in line and bought my ticket even if I knew it was going to just be two hours of Captain America and Falcon doing their laundry.  More casual moviegoers will probably hope for something a bit more dramatically involved, however.

So what’s it about, you ask?  Well, Paul Rudd plays Scott Lang, a professional thief in San Francisco, who winds up helping old, affluent scientist Hank Pym (Michael Douglas) prevent his protégé, Darren Cross (Corey Stoll), from doing terrible things with a special suit that allows the wearer to shrink down to a bug-size super-soldier. Pym has a suit of his own, which he gives to Lang. With the help of Pym’s envious daughter Hope (Evangeline Lilly, who, in a pageboy wig, doesn’t look a day over Barbara Hershey), Pym trains Lang to break into his lab, which Cross controls, dismantle the new suit and wipe out all the data and research necessary to produce more.  And that is mercifully that.

If you’re not aware of all the drama involved in bringing Ant-Man to the screen, that most likely means you’re not one to follow the ins and outs of the movie industry and probably don’t care.  Take my word for it, though - given how much went on in the eight years it took to get this movie to the big screen, it is amazing that the finished product is as good as it is. Director Peyton Reed (Down With Love, Bring It On) was a marvelous (no pun intended) choice to replace Shaun of the Dead's Edgar Wright, who left the project due to those infamous “creative difference” a mere weeks before filming was to begin.  Reed’s experience with placing a light-hearted, but not outright ridiculous tone on material proves we should never doubt Marvel’s decisions about what’s right for THEIR material.  The way I imagine Edgar Wright would’ve made this film would almost certainly have resulted in something that was more HIS and not Marvel’s, and we just can’t have that, now can we…?

What allows Ant-Man to flourish is that it largely turns its back on the solemnity and self-importance that occasionally hamper Marvel features and instead traffics in the same sort of freewheeling frivolity seen in last summer's Guardians of the Galaxy.  For that, thank the four screenwriters — Wright, Attack the Block's Joe Cornish, “Funny or Die”'s Adam McKay and Rudd himself — and their ability to include witticisms both verbal ("tales to astonish" is there for the comic fans) and visual (I loved -the bug zapper, and is that oversized toy with the happy face a nod to Ghostbusters?).  Rudd and a scene-stealing Michael Peña (as Lang's ex-con buddy) further contribute to the gee-whiz spirit, with Douglas and Lilly staking out most of the dramatic content.  Even Ant-Man’s encounter with a particular Avenger, while obviously shoehorned into the movie as a means of tying the movie to the larger Universe, was written and executed so well that it didn’t bother me or make me feel the plot had ground to a halt.

The effects are excellent in general, particularly the final showdown in a child’s bedroom.  The sequence is such a contrast to the world-sized, city-destroying spectacle climaxes of most superhero flicks that it must be applauded for merely trying it.  That the film pulls it off is even better. Ironically, only the film’s ants fail to completely convince.  Granted, they're not laughable creations on the order of the insects seen in the '70s shlock flick Empire of the Ants, but they're obvious enough as CGI to bug all but the most forgiving of Marvel devotees.

While I learned enough about all the protagonist characters to interest me and bring me to care about them, I admit I’d like to have seen a bit more development of the villain, Darren Cross.  I suppose in one sense, he’s the bad guy and we see that he’s a sicko, and that should be enough, but part of me wished for some more insight on why this guy was so intense in his dislike-bordering-on-hatred for his mentor/father-figure, and how on Earth he’d risen so far being so obvious a nut-job. The movie is called Ant-Man, though, not “Yellowjacket,” so if this is my only beef with the film, it must be a pretty trivial one.

The final result of all this is that I must say Marvel appears to be bulletproof. I certainly wouldn’t begin to think of placing Ant-Man on a list with such “heist” classics as I’ve listed earlier, but it doesn't do that label any disservice.  While that may be the mindset the brain-trust at Marvel used as inspiration for the movie’s tone, it’s not what actually resulted.  But that’s fine - what did result was an entry in an on-going film series that fits perfectly, yet can be viewed independently and enjoyed all by itself.  Ant-Man is funny, clever blast of a movie.

Marvel does it again with "Captain America: The Winter Soldier"

The concept of Freedom-versus-Security has been prevalent in the popular discussion to varying degrees for the last decade and a half, perhaps at its most heated these last couple years thanks to the doings of Edward Snowden.  There are some who claim that when our society cried “never again” after that day in September of 2001, we began the possibly-irreversible process of willingly surrendering our freedoms in exchange for some sense of safety.  Perhaps the deep thinkers among us wouldn’t think of looking to an entry in the Marvel cinematic universe for an illustration of this concept, but in a rather simplified fashion, that is just what we find in Captain America: The Winter Soldier.  

While nobody would confuse this movie with such 1970s political conspiracy thrillers as The Parallax View or Three Days of the Condor, there is a similar vibe running through The Winter Soldier that sets it apart from earlier Marvel films, and makes it possibly the best Marvel film since the first Iron Man movie.  The fear of spoilers shall keep me from outlining the plot of the movie in too much detail, but I suspect that most of those reading this will have a fairly good notion of what’s going on.  Even if you are not pre-educated about the particulars of Captain America’s literary universe, however, this follow-up to the first Captain America solo film three years ago probably serves you better than most of the other Marvel movies, as one could come into this movie cold and not find it very difficult to keep up.

Directors Joe and Anthony Russo and their screenwriters pull off a pretty nifty balancing act, moving the film along from action set piece to action set piece with actual interesting character development, and the development of SEVERAL characters who are dramatically limited by our knowing they will all be included in future movies.  We all read IMdB, so we know who the “Winter Soldier” turns out to be.  We all know (or can surmise) who will turn out to be the movie’s ultimate villain.  We all know that Cap and Natasha and Falcon and Fury will all survive (although one supporting character who has shown up on the S.H.I.E.L.D. television show a couple of times this year did bite the big one in this movie, much to my surprise… oops, Spoiler… sorry).  The trick is telling us a great story and taking us on a cinematic ride despite those limitations, and the Russos manage to do the job.

Here we find “Captain” Steve Rogers (Chris Evans) farther along in his acclimation to modern life than he was when we last saw him in The Avengers, even keeping a small notebook of things he makes a point of researching (the “Rocky” movies, the music of Marvin Gaye, etc.).  He meets Army veteran Sam Wilson (Anthony Mackie), who will later become the mechanically-winged Falcon, at the beginning of the story, and it is the proverbial Start of a Beautiful Friendship that helps humanize this story and keep it from devolving into a mere collection of action set-pieces. Scarlett Johansson’s Black Widow also comes to this movie and provides enough one-liner delivering and wire-work butt-kicking to make it apparent that a lack of her OWN film is something that must be rectified at some point, in my humble opinion.  Thankfully, the chemistry these three actors share, conveying so much of their communication with each other via glances and body language, does a lot to keep the story actually being about something a little more human.  

Samuel L. Jackson’s S.H.I.E.L.D. director Nick Fury gets to chew up and spit out dialogue yet again, as only Jackson can do, but he has a bit more plot-driving function in this script than he did in The Avengers, as well as revealing a bit more about the character.  He is even the focal point of perhaps the best action sequence of the movie, a machine-gun filled car chase throughout the streets of Washington, DC (well, it was actually Cleveland, but we can all pretend) where we first run across the metal-armed assassin, the “Winter Soldier.”  

With all that being said, it saddens me to report that Robert Redford is probably the weakest link in this stellar cast.  Playing a S.H.I.E.L.D. executive uber-boss, he definitely embodies a shadier character than he has since Indecent Proposal.  While Redford may be a living movie legend, he wanders through this movie in a vague, stern-grandfatherly manner, never getting very animated, even when the plot may require it, and never totally convincing me he knew what exactly to do with the role.  I’ve always thought him a rather “cold” actor, and that was pretty apparent here.  His final line of dialogue in the film, which I am reluctant to reveal for spoilering reasons, fell so totally flat with me that I almost groaned, but that was the only such moment.

I thoroughly enjoyed this entry in the Marvel movie saga.  I darn well should, as I am exactly the audience at which it is aimed (well, almost - I’m probably about twenty years older than the target demographic, but I fit the criteria in all other respects).   Long-time comics reader that I am, I loved the tone of the story and thought the shoot-’em-up/blow-’em-up sequences to be fantastic, which is all one could ask of a superhero movie.  From crashing flying aircraft carriers to raging gun battles in city streets to a gang fight within the confines of a glass elevator, there is no shortage of kinetic energy here.

As it is an entry in an ongoing franchise of other films, while at the same time being another chapter in a series about one particular character, Winter Soldier operates under some restrictions to which even a rather formulaic series as the James Bond films are not subject.  How well the movie managed to tell a quality story that felt topical and relevant, and also managed to keep me in suspense and throw some surprises at me, is a testament to the creative team’s abilities.

"Iron Man 3" seems to be an experiment in the effects of rapid-fire wise-cracks.

Robert Downey, Jr. is a funny guy.  We all know that, right?  I don’t mean just as the characters he plays – you’ve seen him do press or talk shows when he’s promoting something, and he’s obviously as sharp as a tack.  We’ve also all seen the other two Iron Man pictures, as well as The Avengers, and it’s fairly apparent that the wise-ass genius Tony Stark was the role he was born to play.  The snarky, rapid-fire dialogue which comes so easily to Downey was the highlight of his three previous portrayals of the character (well, four, if you include his post-credits scene in The Incredible Hulk).  The question I have after seeing Iron Man 3, however, is at what point does a highlight start to blind us?

Shane Black, the screenwriter who created Riggs & Murtaugh in Lethal Weapon, and wrote and directed the criminally-underappreciated Kiss, Kiss, Bang, Bang (also starring Downey), assumes the director’s chair for this entry of the series from Jon Favreau (who thankfully still found time to return and play Stark’s bodyguard Happy Hogan).  He and his co-writer Drew Pearce give us a story of how Stark is adjusting to his world after being so emotionally scarred by his experiences in The Avengers, suffering from anxiety and insomnia, and driving him to focus obsessively on his various suits of armor, which puts strain on his relationship with Pepper Potts (Gwyneth Paltrow).  Along comes the terrorist threat known as The Mandarin (Ben Kingsley), as well as some professional acquaintances from Stark’s past conveniently reentering his life, namely one Aldrich Killian (Guy Pearce), and the resulting death and destruction drive him to learn just what his priorities really should be.  

Iron Man 3 is a lot of fun and fits in the series very well.  It feels like we’re seeing the same characters in the same world we’ve observed before, and it’s definitely the most frenetic of the three movies.  The action pieces of the film, of which there are several, are spectacular.  We’ve all seen the destruction of Stark’s mansion in the trailers and TV spots, so it’s not a spoiler to say that if you thought that was impressive, there are others just as good before movie’s end.  Stark spends a great deal of the time outside his armor, even during battle, and this new story-wrinkle leads to a whole lot more techno-cacophony.  If anything, Black gets a little carried away with the mayhem at the movie’s conclusion, but Hell, if you buy a ticket to a superhero movie (or a Shane Black movie, for that matter) without expecting lots and lots of Stuff-Blown-Up-Good, then you’d best do a better job of researching how to spend your entertainment dollar.  

Black tries to take us a little deeper into everybody’s psyche than the previous movies did.  Stark has so much of his world upended during this movie that he has to seriously reexamine just what being Iron Man means to him, and how it impacts the people around him.  He spends a large portion of the movie out of his armor, being forced to come to grips with his emotional distress and to rely on his wits, and not his inventions.  Black excels at writing the sort of dialogue that Downey excels at delivering, and he has provided a different tone for the series, but while the concept of Stark’s introspection is very interesting, I think Black misfires in the execution in a few ways. 

Sure, it would be foolish to attempt making this film without taking advantage of Downey’s wit, but there are some instances in Iron Man 3 where the old adage of Less-being-More is ignored.  Stark’s mouth is pretty much running constantly throughout the movie, yapping off at each and every character he encounters, regardless of the logic.  The addition of an almost-stereotypical “kid sidekick” was a bitter disappointment, and seemed to primarily be A) a means to provide Stark a target for some rapid-fire smart-ass-ness, and B) a marketing ploy to involve kids who are probably too young to be seeing this PG-13/borderline-R movie in the first place.  

As good a job as Black does at delving deeper into Stark, he does it at the expense of the other characters around him.  The Killian and Maya Hansen characters are woefully underdeveloped, and the Hansen character in particular is almost dumped from the film about two-thirds of the way through.  As much fun as Don Cheadle’s Rhodey/Iron Patriot may be in the movie's final act, even his inclusion felt wedged in there, in a story-logic sort of way. 

Iron Man 3 is a worthy entry in the series, and I enjoyed it enough that I look forward to the character’s return in The Avengers 2 in a couple of years, but as good a movie as it is, I can see how it could have been even better.  I liked how we delved deeper into Stark’s relationship with Pepper and his overall mindset after his experiences in The Avengers, but while Stark so famously said “I am Iron Man” at the conclusion of the first film, and he does come to learn more about what that phrase means to him by the end of this movie, I’m left wanting to learn a few more things.  But, hey - we sure got a lot of great one-liners…