Director: Peyton Reed
Cast: Paul Rudd, Evangeline Lilly, Jonathan Majors, Michelle Pfeiffer
Have I Seen it Before: Na.
Did I Like It: As a reframed high-pulp adventure with its protagonist and beating heart being a gender-swapped Obi-Wan Kenobi played by Michelle Pfeiffer, this third Ant-Man and thirty-first MCU film is exactly what I could want from two hours worth of diversion.
Sadly, though, this nearly perfect pitch for a movie only makes up at best half of the runtime presented. Even in those scenes where Pfeiffer reigns supreme, I don’t think I’ve yet to see a star more bored with the movie around him than Michael Douglas here. It’s to his credit that I couldn’t help but share in his boredom. Pfeiffer is game, but every utterance and gesture from Douglas screams “contractual obligation.”
Elsewhere, things don’t fare any better. Paul Rudd has never—even from his first appearance in Halloween: The Curse of Michael Myers (1995)—been anything other than a perfectly pleasant screen presence, and he has always brought the right amount of levity to Ant-Man. This is not a typical case of miscasting. But Ant-Man does feel like the wrong character to usher in this new era of Marvel movies. He is forced to look earnest as Kang (Majors) foreshadows things to come and kicks the shit out of him (anyone else really looking forward to Creed III, regardless of whether or not a Stallone-less Rocky movie feels like a shaky idea?). There are very few jokes. Certainly fewer than either of the two previous Ant-Man films. Luis is nowhere to be found. The filmmakers have explained that he didn’t fit into the story, and they are probably right. I think that says more about how much, again, this is the wrong story for Ant-Man.
But other films in the series have been weighed down by the burden of having to set up the larger story of that phase. Iron Man 2 (2010) and Avengers: Age of Ultron (2015) immediately come to mind. And yet, here, I am underwhelmed. I’ve missed most of the movies released post-Avengers: Endgame (2019). I honestly wouldn’t have made a point to see this film if I didn’t have an oil change running and a couple of hours to kill. I even left the theater before any tag scene started*. These films aren’t surprisingly delightful anymore. Marvel will somehow have to get back that feeling if they are going to keep their dominance over the multiplexes.
*I had to pee. I checked wikipedia to see what the tag scenes were, and were more than fine missing them.