Ant-Man (2015)

	Also Known As: -
	Year of first release: 2015
	Director: Peyton Reed (The Break-Up)
	Actors: Paul Rudd (Knocked Up, The is the End), Michael Douglas (The Game), Corey Stoll (House of Cards TV-series), Evangeline Lilly (The Hobbit 2-3)
	Country: USA
	Genre: Action, SF
	Conditions of visioning: 14.10.2015, In-flight Entertainment system, 8" screen
Synopsis: Discoverer of a formula to shrink living beings to ant-size, Dr. Hank Pym (Douglas) leaves the company he founded in order to keep this potential weapon secret. Thirty years later his work is about to be replicated so he looks for a thief in the person of Scott (Rudd) to suit up and prevent chaos.
Review: I have seen the trailer of this movie too many times this summer and got sick of it. Furthermore I didn't read good critics about it, so I only watched it to complete my knowledge of the Marvel Cinematic Universe and because it was available on-board a long flight. The visioning conditions were clearly not ideal for such a blockbuster but I got the gist anyway: as I feared, the movie is not much more than what is shown in the trailer and the story feels like nothing more than a direct-to-video spin-off of the other Marvel movies, maybe like the TV-series Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. (although I haven't seen it so I can't really say). So the story is not really enthralling and even sometimes confused, the actors just OK, the dialogs usually flat but sometimes delivering punchlines for the audience to remember, and the special effects are medium-good (special mention to the 30-years rejuvenation of Michael Douglas by the special effects company Lola VFX). But the worst is probably the humour, revolving mainly around the thief, and usually coming from the fact that he fails at training with the suit, or that he cracks a joke at the wrong moment (a similar tentative of humour as done in The Guardians of the Galaxy) For those who like the Marvel Cinematic Universe, I would rather advise the excellent TV-series Daredevil produced by Netflix. Many wonder what could have the movie been if Edgar Wright (Shaun of the Dead, Hot Fuzz, Scott Pilgrim vs. The World, The World's End) had stayed at its reins instead of leaving the executives "due to differences in their visions of the film", but this we will never know. He is credited as writer nonetheless.
Rating: 4 /10