Good afternoon, everyone. Welcome to my next post in this series covering the Marvel Cinematic Universe. The movie that we are covering is a small-scale one and also the end of the MCU’s second phase: “Ant-Man”. This movie was directed by Peyton Reed and stars Paul Rudd as Scott Lang, Michael Douglas as Hank Pym, Evangeline Lilly as Hope van Dyne, Corey Stoll as Darren Cross, and Michael Peña as Luis. This movie is kind of a heist movie in a sense in addition to a superhero movie. Let’s get into detail on how “Ant-Man” went down.
The movie opens in 1989 where we see Hank Pym have a confrontation with Howard Stark about Pym’s shrinking technology. After this disagreement, he resigns from SHIELD after all he has done for them. The Marvel Studios logo then pops up while some Latino music plays. We cut to Scott Lang (Paul Rudd) fight a fellow inmate before the guards break it up and Scott leaves the jail. Luis meets up with him and they drive away in his van. Scott tells Luis that he has a daughter to take care of during the drive. We then see Scott work at a Baskin Robbins before talking with his manager Dale. Scott is then fired by him during this talk. Scott then goes to a hotel where he meets up with Luis and his heist buddies (one of them is played by the rapper T.I.). Scott tells Luis again that he doesn’t want to go back to jail. Meanwhile, we see Hank Pym (Michael Douglas) arrive to Pym Technologies where he sees his daughter Hope and a guy named Darren. They bring him to the Futures Lab where old videos of Ant-Man were shown in action. Darren then shows the Yellowjacket suit, which is based on Pym’s original technology. Hank is not pleased by this at all. After that scene, we see Scott come to his daughter Cassie’s birthday party. Scott is then kicked out of the party by his ex-wife and her new fiancé (who is a cop), even though it is his daughter that they are celebrating. We then cut it Darren talking with one of the guys about the suit before he basically kills him. Cross then has a dinner where he talks about gratitude. Scott then drives to Luis’s place where Luis gives him a talk about “the tip” about a potential heist. Basically, they are in the search for a safe. After a montage of setting it up, the heist buddies are ready for their mission. Scott jumps over a fence and into a house through the second floor window. A 20 minute timer is set up and he gets in the house, grabs some keys, and looks for the safe. Apparently, the safe has fingerprint security. He gets the fingerprint with the stove and he gets in the room with the Carbondale safe (I did like the Titanic movie reference the buddies said). Scott uses water and liquid nitrogen to get the door open. Once in the safe, he found Pym’s old Ant-Man suit. Unbeknownst to Scott, Hank is watching this unfold through surveillance.
We then cut to an experiment gone wrong when a lamb gets reduced to goop. After that brief scene, we see Scott try on the suit and shrinking to the size of an ant while in a bathtub. Scott gets out of the tub, but falls down a floor to a party. Thankfully, he is able to escape without being crushed. He gets sucked up by a vacuum and jumps out. As he gets outside, he lands on a car and gets back to normal size. He brought back the suit, but was arrested anyway. While he is in jail, he meets with Hank Pym. Pym tells him that second chances don’t come by all the time. As Scott sits in his cell, he comes across some ants that give him the suit. He puts it on and shrinks to the size of an ant. He gets supported by Pym’s ant friends and gets on a flying ant. After some craziness, Scott falls down and then wakes up in a house. Hope tells Scott that Hank with waiting for him. With the help of the ants, he steps carefully out of the room and talks with Pym. Hank tells Scott that he can speak to the ants before leading him to a secret room. During the talk, Hank tells Scott about bringing Darren to PymTech and how Darren was obsessed with Pym’s shrinking formula. Scott says that he is done stealing stuff before Hank tells him to steal something (that is a funny moment). Meanwhile, we see Darren test his experiment again. This time, he is successful in shrinking the lamb. Hank tells Scott that if Darren gets into the Yellowjacket suit, chaos will ensue. Hope tells her dad that she is able to use the suit, but he says no (even though she knows the place well). What follows is Scott being trained by Hank and Hope in a variety of ways to be the best Ant-Man that he can be. Hank warns Scott that if he messes with the regulator, he could go to the Quantum Realm. A funny scene happens when Scott gets attack by a whole bunch of crazy ants. While this training is going on, they are figuring out a way to get past security. After a brief chat between Scott and Hope where he says that he has a daughter to take care of, he puts on an earpiece to communicate with the ants through his mind. A couple of ants grab and spin a penny. Hank then tells Hope and Scott that his wife (Hope’s mother) turned off her regulator and went subatomic to keep a missile from blowing up back in 1987. Hank didn’t tell Hope this sooner to protect her. After that emotional moment, Scott succeeds with his training and they get ready for a mission. Scott heads to the Avengers facility in Upstate New York. He then fights with Falcon (Anthony Mackie) for a bit, even though Hank is not happy. During the fight, Scott gets in Falcon’s flight pack and is able to get past him and get the device that they needed. With the device in their possession, they can move on with their plan. Darren comes in to interrupt the festivities while the ants hide the evidence. Darren calls Hope and tells her that he is tripling security. Scott tells them that they can use the water main to get in the facility with the help of Scott’s heist friends. Scott shows everyone that he can shrink. While he is small, he scares Luis by getting on his shoulder. Later, Scott visits his daughter while she is sleeping and kisses her. After that scene, they get to the facility where the heist begins. Luis sneaks in as a security officer while Scott goes down to the sewers. Luis adjusts the water level, allowing Scott to get in the building, with the help of a lot of ants. Hank arrives at the facility and gets in after the undercover cops get distracted.
Darren brings Hank and Hope in to show the improved Yellowjacket suit. Meanwhile, Scott and the ants fly to the control room and fries the servers. Some Hydra people arrive at the room before Hank punches Darren. Elsewhere, the ants and Scott plant some explosives to mess everything up. Scott is able to jump down to the Yellowjacket suit (with some help from his heist friends), but is unable to steal it. It turns out that Darren knew about this plan. Darren then says that he has sold the suits to Hydra and the Ten Rings. Before anyone gets shot, Scott and Hope knock out some guys. Hank is shot anyway and Darren plans to shoot Scott. Thankfully, the ants save Scott and the others. Hope tells Scott to get the Yellowjacket suit. He gets out of the building with the help of Luis. They all get out before the building blows up. Hank and Hope escape via a big tank that was disguised as a keychain. Darren flies via helicopter with the suit, but not before fatally shooting Antony. Scott gets to the helicopter and confronts Darren for a bit. During this, they see the facility blown up and shrunk to nothing. Scott is hanging for his life before he sees Darren in the suit. They fight for a bit before they get stuck in a suitcase, which falls down to a pool. They both emerge from the pool and fight again. Ant-Man wins for the moment by slapping Yellowjacket to a bug zapper (which Darren somehow survived). Scott then gets tased and arrested by the two cops before finding out that Cassie is visited by Darren. Scott is able to shrink down and fights Darren again to protect Cassie. He is not alone as he has his ant friends while fighting Darren on Cassie’s train set. The heist buddies arrive, but back up due to a lot of cops. A couple of Pym disks make an ant and Thomas the Tank Engine grow to a huge size. The cop arrives in the room and tries to save Cassie. Meanwhile, Scott has to shrink down in a similar way to Hope’s mother to defeat Darren and save Cassie. Darren is then shrunk and sent to the Quantum Realm. Scott is able to escape and head back to reality after a trippy sequence. He hugs Cassie before he leaves the house. Scott has a brief chat with Hank about the experience in the Quantum Realm. Hank wonders if his wife is alive given that Scott survived his trip. Scott then talks with the cop, who tells him that he is in no legal trouble. Cassie tells her dad that she did a full cartwheel before feeding the big ant. Scott then gets a call and leaves for another mission. Luis informs Scott, after a montage of stuff (which includes Stan Lee as a bartender), that he is being recruited to be in the Avengers by Sam Wilson. After the name montage, Hank shows Hope the Wasp suit that will be used in the next Ant-Man movie: “Ant-Man and the Wasp.” After the credits, we see Steve Rogers and Sam Wilson talk with each other while Bucky is in the room. Falcon says that he knows a guy before the scene goes to black. The movie ends with “Ant-Man will return.”
This movie is solid to me. I liked the scenes where Ant-Man was small and was exploring the world from a different perspective. The ants were a highlight of the movie, including Antony. It was still a bummer when Antony got killed off by Darren. Speaking of Darren, I didn’t like this character at all. No offense to Corey Stoll at all, but his character wasn’t likable at all. The cop fiancé was unlikable too until the very end of the movie. Paul Rudd is fantastic as Scott Lang. He is an extremely likable guy who wants to do the right thing after being in jail too many times. It was great to see him with his daughter Cassie at several points in this movie, including after he survived the Quantum Realm. His heist buddies were another highlight, especially Michael Peña as Luis. Hank Pym was played well by Michael Douglas as was Hope van Dyne by Evangeline Lilly. Even though their relationship was iffy, I was glad that they reconciled with Hank giving the Wasp suit to Hope. Some of the scenes were trippy as heck, including when Scott was in the Quantum Realm after defeating Darren. That realm will be explored more in the sequels. I found plenty of things funny in this movie, including seeing an ant and a Thomas the Tank Engine toy grow to big sizes. I liked it when Cassie was feeding the big ant near the end of the movie. The score by Christophe Beck was solid in this movie, including the main theme for Ant-Man.
Overall, I thought “Ant-Man” was a good watch. It was a change of scale from the previous movie in the MCU: “Age of Ultron”. It had some laughs, some unique moments with stuff shrinking and growing. It’s not in my top 10 MCU movies, but I still had fun with it. Next up in the MCU is the first movie in the third and final phase in the Infinity Saga: “Captain America: Civil War”. That movie is going to be a big one. I can’t wait to do that post. In the meantime, I hope you all have a great day.
(Here is the video on this movie by the people at How It Should Have Ended.)
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