Ant-Man no big deal

Most comic book superheroes are larger than life egomaniacs who only strive to be bigger than they are in real life. Take Tony Stark. Please. He’s the pompous billionaire genius bombast with delusions of grandeur, and so the only way he could improve upon himself is to create a flying metal body suit with snazzy colours and multifarious weapons and high tech computers and possibly AM/FM and Wi-Fi.

And then he made more suits. Bigger suits. Hulk-busting suits. Puh-lease. Next thing you know, he’ll be putting truck nuts and ‘Tap Out’ stickers on them.

The years of these over the top characters is over. Well, at least it’s declining.

Meet Ant-Man, two millimetres of the fastest, spunkiest and small time punkiest superhero that has graced the silver screen. Anty, as I like to call him, is Scott Lang (Paul Rudd, in his least chatty role). He is a cat burglar with a heart of gold and a daughter. Burgling and being a responsible parent/respectable member of society are mutually exclusive enterprises. After he finds himself in the hoosegow one last time, he pledges to find gainful and meaningful employment that best befits his electrical engineering aptitudes.

He ends up working at an ice cream stand, and promptly gets fired after the owner finds out his criminal record. Scott finds that making a clean slate from his past is not as easy as the proverbial turning a corner. In the real world, there are many corners and dimensions.

Given a second chance by Hank Pym (Michael Douglas), he barely balks at the notion of donning a super-suit that shrinks him to entomological proportions. After all, he’s saving the world from a dastardly villain. That’s exactly what good guys do, even if there is mortal peril and not a single paycheque in sight.

Pym discovered a particle that could shrink a person down to ant size while magnifying the person’s abilities to ant strength. These prospects must have thrilled researchers and military industrialists alike. He decides that it is far better to withhold progress from the nefarious even if it means great personal sacrifice.

When his former protĂ©gĂ© Darren Cross (Corey Stoll) takes over the company and one-ups the prototype of an ant suit that he intends to sell to those who do not mean well in the world, well, Pym can’t simply sit idly by. He enlists Scott to step up and stop world domination by means of getting really small and stopping something really big.

I sure hope that it’s okay that I oversimplified the plot. If you want, I could analyze the technicalities and the realities of the characters and the scenarios, going into miniscule detail about why Ant-Man is barely interesting and threadbare as a story.

Yes, we all enjoyed the National Geographic ‘World of the Small’ moments where Scott sees dust bunnies several storeys high, surfs the tidal waves of a bathtub faucet opened up, and gets to run, jump and fly around with the ants. These formic creatures, rendered as best as humanly possible, still ring false even though they are meant to have personalities to make them more endearing.

You want ants? Let me show you my backyard. I’ve got your ants and they don’t need to be in 3-D either.

The point is that Paul Rudd is a pretty decent comic performer. Even though he is one of several people who have writing credits on this film, we don’t really get much of the comedian that we know and love. The list also includes Edgar Wright (writer of Shaun of the Dead), Adam McKay (writer of Anchorman) and Joe Cornish (writer of Attack the Block and The Adventures of Tintin). Separately, they are intelligent and vivacious creators of fun and compelling stories. Together, they become too many cooks spoiling a broth.

I wanted to like this Ant-Man because such comic book translations are too formulaic and too stale far too often. Instead, I was reminded of the industrious ants in my backyard. Pesky and pernicious little punks. Small comfort, that.