With two ensemble films following one after another, Greg D. Smith notes it was time for the MCU to return to a slightly smaller story – in every sense of the word. Returning to Earth with a bump after the extra-terrestrial adventures of the Guardians of the Galaxy and the global-altering events of Age of Ultron, Ant-Man sought to introduce us to a new kind of hero. When burglar with a heart of gold Scott Lang agrees to do one last job to try and make the money he needs to see his daughter, he ends up getting far more trouble than he bargained for.

Paul Rudd. You know, that guy. One of those actors who you wouldn’t necessarily know by name but when faced with his picture would say ‘Oh, that guy. Mike from Friends’, or ‘The dude from all the Seth Rogen comedies.’ Getting him to helm an entry into the blockbuster MCU franchise might have seemed like an odd decision, but in hindsight, it was exactly the casting that was required.

After two movies of quite heavy themes of large scale destruction, attempted genocide and the search for belonging and a ‘family’ by those with neither, it was about time that the MCU lightened the tone and gave us a movie that was small-scale, cute and funny. So of course it starts with our protagonist being punched in the face by a fellow inmate on his last day in prison.

Yes, that’s right. This film that everyone sort of dismisses as a light-hearted comedy romp really does have some quite seriously dark overtones and it’s not like they’re lurking all that far beneath the surface. In terms of our hero, it’s mitigated a little by the fact that his crime is of the white collar, Robin Hood variety so beloved of screenwriters who want their protagonist to have legitimate credence as an ex-con but don’t want the messiness of them actually being a ‘bad person’. So yes, he took some money from a rich asshole and therefore although he’s a convicted criminal, we the audience are automatically on board with him because he’s the good kind.

What’s slightly less easy to swallow is his friends, who are also criminals. Their excuse is less compelling – they just want money, and they invite Scott to join them and use his skills to help rob a particularly wealthy old man. At this point, we’ve seen Scott struggle to hold any sort of job (due to his ‘criminal’ past – and given the nature of his offence, the length of his sentence and his ethnic grouping, this seems a touch unrealistic to me) and so he’s tempted into doing this ‘one job’ to get the money he needs to make child support, pay the bills and get to see his kid.

Of course, he ends up being in the house of one Hank Pym, and walking away with the Ant-Man suit. As setups go, it’s not a terrible one, but maybe a little by-the-numbers, but then that can be said about a lot of this movie – it’s charm is in how it makes you still care even when you realise that you’re watching a script pretty much on autopilot.

Take for example, the revelation partway through the movie that Pym’s wife, Janet, disappeared into the Quantum Realm after turning off her suit’s regulator in an attempt to disable a soviet nuclear missile. As Pym warns Lang that he must never turn off his suit’s regulator, hands up how many of you sat there and immediately knew that at some point, Scott would find himself in a situation where he had to turn off his regulator and enter the Quantum Realm? Because I did, but that’s ok because Scott comes back because he has his strong attachment to his little girl who he must go back for and this helps him to….wait a minute, what?

And this is the point at which I will address the elephant in the ant-sized room – Hope Van Dyne. Smart, capable, actually related to Hank Pym and fully combat ready, it seems utterly criminal that the film not only sidelines her from wearing the Ant-Man suit (for the completely weak tea reasoning that Pym doesn’t want to lose his daughter the same way he lost his wife – puh-leaase) but also doesn’t actually let her be anything other than a sidekick. Sure, the movie ends with the reveal of the suit that Pym was working on for Janet ‘but now realises was for Hope’ (and which is substantially different from the suit we’ve seen her wearing in trailers for the sequel) but that just feels like an afterthought. Evangeline Lilly has the credentials to have played a much bigger role in the action in this movie, and her character damned well certainly has the credentials to play a bigger role in her father’s plans. Imagine all the time he could have saved with the training of Scott (by Hope herself no less) if he had just suited up Hope and let her go in and grab the Yellowjacket suit. Superhero movies (on all sides) have struggled for years to get any sort of decent representation for female characters but this one stings more than most because the movie literally gives you a female character right there on the screen who is more capable than the lead and then sidelines her. It grates, and it grates worse that the movie insists on pairing her off with Lang at the end. Still, I’m getting ahead of myself.

The training montages (the above irritants notwithstanding) actually are entertaining to watch and well put together. It’s nice to see how much creativity and work went into the effects themselves, and the inventive ways in which the powers are used is even better – the sequencing of running at a door, shrinking to leap through the keyhole and then becoming big again is just one example of someone actually having sat down to work out an interesting action sequence making use of the powers of the character rather than just having it be a standard ‘shrink him to get past everything’ type scenario.

The FX come into play later as well in all sorts of fun ways – Hank’s keyring tank, the final battle with Cross taking place on a Thomas the Tank Engine trainset and the giant pet ant at the end all being good examples. Even the Quantum Realm stuff is pleasantly detailed, and a little bit trippy, calling to mind in hindsight the different realms we see in Doctor Strange and making me wonder to this day if we will ever see some sort of crossover between the two franchises on this basis (probably not, but I cam dream). It’s all slick, well put together, and again helps to smooth over the very obvious choices that the plot makes at every turn.

As for the villain – well, there’s an interesting topic all by itself. Corey Stoll does the best he can with the material he has, but it’s difficult to escape the fact that Cross is somewhat of a pantomime villain, chewing on the scenery in every appearance throughout the film. As Pym’s former protégé and now owner of his company, Cross is obsessed with perfecting the miniaturisation tech of the Ant-Man suit that Hank still insists never even existed. This obsession leads us down some interesting roads as Cross tests his own version of the tech on various cute animals and at least one person who he doesn’t like, all with the same messy results. At points like this, it’s difficult not to see Cross as fully pantomime, and it undermines other scenes that shoot for him being cold and calculating. There’s certainly no real way of relating to the man and as a dark mirror he works neither for Lang nor Hank. Basically he ends up feeling like he just sort of has to be there so that for the final act he can lose his cool completely and don the Yellowjacket suit for the big finale fight with Lang. Of all the MCU villains while he certainly isn’t the worst or most poorly served, he’s definitely a shoe-in for the most cliched, which at least makes him right at home in the movie.

Still, the third act, like the rest of the movie, does at least entertain. The spectacle is decent, with the FX work combining with the imaginative use of powers to give us beautiful visuals, and the comedy flies thick and fast for our protagonists even as our antagonists reveal a total lack of humour (I suspect a lazier mind might imagine this to be subtle metaphor – to me it just comes across as more heavy-handed clunk from whoever was plotting things, but your own mileage may vary on this point). As things barrel towards that climactic Thomas the Tank Engine fight (another sequence whose impact might have been more pronounced had significant chunks of it not appeared in the trailers) Cross gets, well, more Cross and dons the suit, shenanigans start to happen and we get treats like a fight in a briefcase being jostled about by various things as a massively loud iPod plays music and my particular favourite, Yellowjacket slamming into an electrified bug catcher.

As far as a journey – it’s difficult to see what journey it is that Scott goes on, philosophically speaking. Is the Scott we leave at the end of the film significantly different from the one we saw at the start? Sure, he’s more physically capable having been trained by Hope how to fight, and he’s mastered the art of controlling ants and using the suit to a reasonable level. But as a person he’s much the same – perhaps because the movie shies away from making him anything other than a Robin Hood type thief who got caught at the beginning. Had Lang been a bit of a nastier piece of work when the movie began, maybe he could have had a redemptive arc for us to pull for, made all the more poignant by his love for his daughter. As it is, what we get is a guy who pulled a heist for noble reasons and got caught. Then pulls a heist again for noble reasons (to make the money to see his daughter because he literally can’t get a job) and then pulls a heist one more time (breaking into Pym tech to steal the Yellowjacket suit) only to get caught again and have to fight his way out. It’s a circular motion in which a character repeats the same action again and again, leaving little room for any satisfying growth or development.

None of which is to say that I dislike the movie. It gets away with its flaws in the way of plotting because of its charm. Rudd is a likeable lead, able to quip with the best of them. Lilly makes a frustratingly more-than-equal foil for him and Douglas is as good as he’s always been. Michael Pena as Luis often gets the lion’s share of the comedy, but in all honesty his character lacks much if a point beyond being the ‘funny’ half of the comedy duo to Rudd’s ‘straight man’.

Where it soars though, is in the imaginative use of FX, and the stunning authenticity of those FX. Judged purely on the spectacle and laughs alone, it’s a top tier entry in the franchise. Judged as a complete package, it’s a visually pretty, by-the-numbers-plotted piece of solid popcorn fluff, fun enough to bear repeat viewings as long as you remember to switch your brain off before you dive in. Its main links to the wider MCU come in the form of flashback scenes with a remarkably well done digital de-ageing job done on Douglas and some decent makeup for Hayley Atwell – always a welcome sight after her criminally short run in Agent Carter – sending her the other way to look older. Other than that, it’s very much its own thing, and honestly, after the heavy lifting done by Age of Ultron before it, it’s just the palate cleanser audiences need. Its prettiness tries to mask how short on fresh plot ideas it is, but as the movie says, Baskin Robbins always finds out.