Marvel’s latest superhero spectacular was supposed to scale down to the level of insects, but instead goes for massive spectacle. Bigger equals blander, writes Owen Gleiberman.

Paul Rudd is such a witty, skilled actor that if any star could take a superhero origin story and breathe some brash new life into it, you’d think it would be him. But in Ant-Man, a big-screen Marvel behemoth that’s as slapped together as it is expensive, Rudd doesn’t just get small. He gets tamed and diluted– spiritually reduced. It’s hard to say if the film neuters his personality or if Rudd got there first. He plays Scott Lang, an idealistic cat burglar who becomes the unwitting guinea pig in an experiment to create the ultimate secret weapon: a stealth superhero the size of an insect. Lang, in his own mind, was meant for bigger things. But after spending three years in San Quentin prison for blowing the whistle on a corporation, he discovers that his life is a wreck. He loses joint custody of his daughter, and the only place that will hire him is Baskin Robbins. That’s when he’s recruited to put on an experimental suit that reduces anyone who wears it to the size of an ant. Supposedly, he gets stronger as well, though we don’t see much evidence of that; it would have been nice if he’d lifted at least one sugar cube 50 times his weight. Rudd, in his first fantasy blockbuster, is like an obedient soldier going through a drill. There’s one funny bit where he says, “I ruined the moment, didn’t I?”, but it’s just about the only moment when the film’s facetiousness seems less than laboured. The actor who injects a bit of pizzazz into Ant-Man is Michael Douglas. He plays Lang’s crusty mentor, Dr Hank Pym, a fallen scientist who has seen his research into how to shrink the distance between atoms stolen right out from under him. Pym has reason to be cranky, but Douglas invests even the most neutral lines with an anger more bristly than his goatee. He acts like he’s still in The China Syndrome – in other words, as if something is truly at stake. Yet his stern performance is also a winning piece of kitsch, because Douglas seems to be the only person on screen who didn’t get the memo: that there’s nothing at stake in Ant-Man beyond a franchise marketing plan aimed squarely at 10-year-olds. The film isn’t terrible, but it makes earlier Marvel outings like the first Spider-Man or Iron Man look like masterpieces. There’s hardly a trope in it you haven’t seen before, and done with far greater flair. ‘It’s the pictures that got small’ The central problem is that Ant-Man, at least in this movie, is not a very fun hero. When Rudd is in costume, his disembodied voice seems severed from the character, there’s little ‘wow!’ factor to his stunts, and even the Ant-Man suit lacks a certain basic pop appeal. Spider-Man looks like a humanoid arachnid, Batman looks like a bat, but Ant-Man looks… well, like a guy in the sort of helmet you’d wear if you were mopping up industrial waste, plus a patchy chest protector that seems to have been fashioned out of a fruit fly’s meshed cornea. Apart from his size, there’s nothing especially ant-like about Ant-Man, though he does command an army of ants and ride around on top of one, which at times makes him seem like the world’s tiniest cowboy leading a high-speed insect cattle drive. None of this would be an issue if he were in any way cool. But he is not. He’s like a miniaturised stunt man who suddenly got yanked onto centre stage. In the 1950s and ‘60s, getting small was a potent source of Hollywood sci-fi fantasy. The Incredible Shrinking Man (1957) and The Fly (1958) were irresistible parables of modern man diminishing into the void as the world around him grew more and more overwhelming. Fantastic Voyage (1966) flipped the power dynamic, as being microscopic took you inside a novel universe – the human body. In each case, the fantasy was indelible. It had the kick of imagination built from the cellular level up. Ant-Man, by contrast, never figures out whether it wants to place us inside Lang’s experience or simply turn it into a spectacle. The villain is a shaven-headed corporate stooge named Darren Cross (Corey Stoll), and everyone keeps nattering on about the “chaos” he’s planning to unleash. But that’s a rather unfortunate word choice, because it evokes the havoc wreaked by Heath Ledger’s Joker, which truly was chaos. Cross, using a miniaturised alter ego named Yellowjacket, never puts forth a plan of much coherence, and that leaves his villainy almost entirely abstract. He’s the bad guy because the movie has to have one. It also needs a love interest, so Pym has an embattled daughter, played by Evangeline Lilly in a Louise Brooks-meets-Catwoman hairdo. She gets to say things like “We’re all doing this for reasons much bigger than any one of us.” At which point you may honestly wonder what those reasons are: the greater fate of Shield? The stock price of Disney? The setting up of the teaser tucked inside the closing credits? Either way, it feels like she’s making a mountain out of an anthill.