IMDb 7.3 / 10
Official trailer
Ant-Man is the Marvel film about a heist. The rating on this page is IMDb’s, since I haven’t watched it, so the number belongs to the crowd and not to me.
Paul Rudd plays Scott Lang, a thief fresh out of prison whom Hank Pym, played by Michael Douglas, recruits to steal back the technology Pym invented and hid. Evangeline Lilly plays Pym’s daughter, Corey Stoll plays the protégé who wants the suit for the military, and Michael Peña plays the friend who tells long stories. It cost about $130 million and made roughly $519 million, a strong result for a character nobody outside comics had heard of.
Ant-Man is the Marvel film I’m most tempted to watch, going by the clips and the pile of reviews. A heist with a shrinking suit and a final fight on a toy train sounds like the kind of small, silly idea this franchise usually sands off, and Paul Rudd playing a normal guy out of his depth is exactly my kind of casting.
The Edgar Wright Problem
Edgar Wright developed this film for about eight years, wrote it with Joe Cornish, and left weeks before shooting over creative differences with Marvel. Peyton Reed took over, and Adam McKay and Paul Rudd rewrote the script. Wright’s version is the great unmade Marvel film, and plenty of viewers watch this one looking for the traces of it. His fingerprints survive in the structure, since the film is a heist picture with a crew, a plan and a training sequence, and Marvel builds nothing else that way.
What reportedly went is the tone. Wright wanted something stranger and funnier at odds with the wider franchise, and Marvel wanted a film that connected to the rest of the machine. The result is a good film that people still argue about.
I find the Wright story more frustrating than the film deserves. A director spends eight years building something odd and funny, and the studio decides it would sooner have a part that plugs into the machine. I’d give a lot to see the version in the drawer.
For Writers
Eight years of development, a director who left and a rewrite weeks before shooting, and the released film still works because the underlying structure was sound. A strong shape survives rewrites; a weak one doesn’t. When you plan a book, get the architecture right before the prose, because you can replace everything above the structure. Write your outline so clearly that another writer could execute it. If it only works in your voice, it isn’t a structure yet, it’s a style holding a draft together.
What the Reviews Say
The consensus is that it’s small, funny and welcome, arriving after Avengers: Age of Ultron in a year of world-ending stakes. The threat is one man with one suit, and the final battle happens on a child’s train set. Rudd gets most of the credit. He’s playing an ordinary man with a criminal record and a daughter, and the comedy comes from him being out of his depth instead of from quips about the situation. Michael Peña’s Luis, and the sequences where the film visualizes his rambling anecdotes with other actors mouthing his words, are the most praised bits in the film. Michael Douglas leads the older half of the story, and Corey Stoll’s villain is generally rated as one of Marvel’s weaker ones. The Luis anecdotes are my favorite idea in the film. Having other actors mouth his rambling is a cheap, clever trick, and it gets more out of one rambling story than most Marvel banter gets out of a whole movie.
Paul Rudd
Rudd was forty-six when this came out and had spent twenty years in comedies, and the casting is the reason the film has a different feel from the rest of the franchise. Surrounded by soldiers, scientists and gods, Scott Lang is a man with a record trying to see his daughter. He also co-wrote the shooting script with Adam McKay, unusual for a Marvel lead, and it shows in the rhythm of the dialogue.
Reviewers consistently name him as the film’s main asset, and the character’s later appearances in the Avengers films lean on exactly the quality he brought here: somebody normal standing next to people who aren’t.
For Writers
Casting a comic actor as a father with a criminal record gives the film a tone the rest of the franchise doesn’t have. One choice at the center can differentiate a story in a crowded genre. When you write inside a well-worn form, change the protagonist’s background instead of the plot machinery. Ask what kind of person nobody puts in this kind of story. Then build your book around them and leave the structure alone.
The Heist Structure
What makes this film unusual in the franchise is its shape. There’s a job, a team, a plan, a training montage and a heist that goes wrong in the expected ways. Marvel usually builds its films around escalation, and it builds this one around a procedure.
That structure also gives the film its best visual jokes. Shrinking is a heist tool, and the sequences where the scale changes mid-action, a briefcase becoming a battlefield, a toy train becoming an artillery piece, come out of the plan instead of the plot needing spectacle.
On paper this is the smartest thing about it. A briefcase turning into a battlefield comes out of the plan, so the spectacle has a reason to exist, and I’d take that over another city falling out of the sky any day.
The quantum realm sequence near the end is the one piece that exists to serve the wider franchise, and it pays off in later films instead of this one.
Where It Sits in the Franchise
It arrived at the end of Marvel’s second phase and is usually ranked in the upper middle of the run: better than the Thor sequel, below Winter Soldier and Guardians of the Galaxy.
Rudd’s Scott Lang became a fixture, and the character’s small scale turned out to be useful to the wider series, and it kept sending him into films that needed somebody to be confused on the audience’s behalf.
Two sequels followed, in 2018 and 2023, and the general view is that the first is the best of the three.
For Writers
Marvel’s biggest film that year was about the end of the world, and this one is about a man stealing a suit, with a climax on a toy train. Scale down and your stakes become legible again. When everything in your genre is escalating, try making the next book smaller, closer and more personal. Take your current plot and cut the stakes by an order of magnitude. Check whether the story gets worse or just gets clearer. Readers care about a person losing something. Scale is decoration.
Why the Score Sits at 7.3
A 7.3 puts it in the middle of the Marvel range, above the weakest entries and below the films people call great. That’s a fair position for a well-liked, modest picture.
The usual complaints are the villain, the standard third-act fight and the sense that a more interesting version exists in a drawer somewhere. The usual praise is Rudd, Peña and the scale gags.
The villain complaint is the one I’d take seriously. Corey Stoll’s protégé wants the suit for the military, and that’s about all the script gives him. Next to a hero this specific, a villain that generic sticks out badly. There’s no rating from me on this page. If you want a Marvel film that isn’t about the sky opening, the crowd says this is one of the good ones.
Craft Note
Craft Note
Ant-Man’s best sequences come from its premise being a tool instead of a power: shrinking is how the heist works. Make your fantastic element solve practical problems in the plot, and it stops being decoration. A power that only matters in the fight scenes isn’t part of the story.
Is Ant-Man worth watching?
IMDb users have it at 7.3, and the consensus is that it’s one of the more likable Marvel films: small, funny and built as a heist instead of a war. Paul Rudd and Michael Peña get most of the credit.
There’s no rating from me on this page, because I haven’t seen it, and the number above is the crowd’s. Rudd, Peña and the scale gags are enough to make me want to, and the flat villain and the standard third-act fight are the only things giving me pause.
