Do I Have To Post A Review?

This post may contain spoilers for Ant Man the movie.  Maybe.  Who knows.  You've been warned.

Yesterday I mentioned that I would go & see the Ant Man movie & I did.  I thought I'd post something of a review here because I'm almost certain no one on the internet has done that yet, & because I talked about it yesterday, & I'm pretending you're a friend who's polite enough to ask me, after I mentioned that I saw the movie, what I thought about it, even though I'm almost certain you don't care.

Because I'm a huge comic book nerd, I am surprising no-one that I go & see these incessant comic book movies, as well as watching all the comic book television shows.  What might not be self-evident is that I don't like a thing just because it's a comic book thing.  I'll probably watch it - I watched Ghost Rider, for fuck's sake - not to mention Smallville (all ten horrifying seasons) - & oh yeah Daredevil The Movie as well as Green Lantern - but I will say afterwards oh my god why did I do that?  The answer is, because I couldn't help it.

I recognize when they're badly done is the point.

Still, as I said yesterday, despite the money they're making (or perhaps because of it), the Marvel movies have given me diminishing returns.  I loved loved loved The Avengers.  I was so-so about the second Thor film.  I was never crazy about the Captain America film, so the sequel was sorta eh.  I outright didn't much like the super hit The Guardians Of The Galaxy, though I did watch it again & appreciated it a bit more.  But I noticed things in watching these movies: they kind of all have the same plot arcs.

Up there I said that maybe because they're making money, they are less interesting to me.  It could be that once a formula is established, if that formula keeps making money, that formula is what they're going to stick with.  (Which might be why Edgar Wright left the Ant Man project, I dunno.)  So each film follows roughly the same arc, with the obligatory sixties or seventies song, the seeming defeat at the denouement, & the hero triumphant at the end.  If anyone goes into a Marvel film thinking anything's really at stake, they're not paying attention - many people have pointed this out.

Even walking in with that knowledge, & low expectations, I was surprised how fluffy & inconsequential Ant Man felt.  I love me some Paul Rudd, & I am happy that that handsome & amiable fellow is making as much money as he doubtless did here, but he's not taking it terribly seriously, & the film doesn't take itself so seriously either.  I wondered if anyone seeing this was really worried Michael Douglas' shrinking machine was going to cause World War III.  Of course they weren't, this wa\sn't an Avengers film.  To underscore this, the films has a battle (as seen in the trailers, no spoiler alert here) on a child's train track, where the bad guy thinks he's going to be run over by a train, but it's a toy train, so it's played for laughs.

Detractors may say that, yes, there are those moments, but Ant Man's got the Falcon & he'll probably join the Avengers in time for the next big movie.  That's a minor part of the film.  Most of it is Paul Rudd doing his clueless, charming thing, & a lot of it is more tongue-in-cheek than grim determination.  The film's best moments - a film which, now that I think about it, is also kinda short on the battle stuff - there's a lot of exposition - seem to come with Ant Man's hapless criminal friends.  In fact, my favorite part of the movie wasn't the shrinking or the ants or the almost-incidental fight scenes, but everything Michael Peña did as Luis.  He was wonderful.  I told my movie viewing companions that I'd watch an entire film about that character.  Marvel!  Start it up!

Listen: don't get me wrong, I enjoyed the film, although mostly because I didn't think I'd enjoy it.  It's fun, it's a summer film.  But it's no Avengers.  I am kinda of the opinion that if there were another great comic book movie like that one, it won't come from a movie studio the success of which is fast-tracking it to profitable complacency.  Which is too bad.

& that's the sort of dumb movie review I would write if I wrote movie reviews on this dumb site.