This new superhero film has committed the cardinal sin of being boring - or at least, much more boring than it should have been. Originally helmed by Edgar Wright, but ousted by Marvel executives in favour of Yes Man director Peyton Reed, the troubled transition has sucked most of the wit and charm from the project, leaving only a plethora of special effects and the occasional joke that feels laboured on delivery. Paul Rudd is Scott Lang, a burglar recruited by Michael Douglas' surprisingly flat mad scientist Hank Pym, who has developed a suit that will shrink Lang down to a minuscule size - one might say, to the size of an ant. This gives him a bit of super-strength (as is par for the course in these things) and he uses his magic to break into a laboratory run by the one-dimensionally evil warmonger Darren Cross (Corey Stoll), who has developed a suit of his own. There are flashes of brilliance in its script - Michael Peña's monologues, an imaginative climax in a child's bedroom - and Paul Rudd is fine, but Reed has little ability to effectively deliver the material, so it mostly comes off as bland and uninspired. If anything, it's too American, too cooperate - it needed that British spark of self-depreciation to really come alive. A shame, really.
★★
