The movie opens in 1989, with a digitally de-aged Michael Douglas strolling into an intelligence-gathering fortress and facing down some powerful frenemies, among them Tony Stark’s dad (John Slattery), a still-lovely-in-middle-age Peggy Carter (“Agent Carter” to “Captain America” and TV fans) and new sneery dude Mitchell Carson (Martin Donovan). Douglas’ character, Hank Pym, has a red vial containing something called “the Pym particle,” and SHIELD wants it, and Carson’s pretty insistent on the point. It doesn’t end well. This appetizer of backstory sets up not only the narrative for this picture, but serves as the equivalent of, um, nation building for the larger conceptual continuity of the MCU, which will be providing the entirety of the United States’ entertainment content, if all goes according to plan, by the year 2025.
The good news is that your enjoyment of this movie won’t be reliant on your getting various in-jokes and character references, even though there are a fair number of them. What the movie delivers for most of its running time is a surprisingly disarming amalgam of “The Incredible Shrinking Man” and “Rififi” by way of Brian De Palma’s first “Mission Impossible” movie, except with Jules Dassin’s goofball element thrown back in the mix. Short version: The “Pym particle” makes the tiny-but-powerful Ant-Man suit operable; in the present day Hank’s too old to work it and too protective of his steely daughter Hope (Evangeline Lilly) to permit her to put it on. So Hank elaborately recruits newly-sprung-from-prison hacker/cat-burglar Scott Lang (Paul Rudd) for a “job.” Said job involves putting a stop to megalomaniacal Darren Cross (a shiny-headed and deliberately-atrociously-outfitted Corey Stoll). Cross is an old protégé of Pym’s, a current employer of Hope’s, and he’s about to make a multi-billion-dollar killing on a weaponized “Yellowjacket” suit that pilfers Pym’s technology.
The stakes are high here, but they’re not as grandiose as they are in most contemporary comic-book-based movies, where the fate of the entire world if not the universe seems to be at stake every time. Yeah, Cross IS a lunatic (messing with the sort of atom-manipulation that makes these suits work can mess with your mind), and he does want to make an army of Yellowjackets, and his buyer, represented by the aforementioned Mitchell Carson, is none other than an outfit called HYDRA. But this movie doesn’t need to destroy whole cities to get its job done. Savvy, wise-cracking Scott wants to make it in the “straight” world so he can have more time with his daughter. The fact that his ex-wife now lives with a defensive cop (Bobby Cannavale) adds not just emotional dad-rival complications, but some plot twists as well. And after Cross smells some kind of rat in his system (it’s not a rat, incidentally, just a whole bunch of telepathically controlled ants), Scott’s lovable knucklehead criminal buddies—portrayed in varying shades of hilarity by Michael Peña, T.I. and David Dastmalchian—are obliged to get in on the action as well.
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