My favorite heist movie of all time is The Italian Job. It sits up there with the first Mission Impossible and Sneakers as one of the films of my teen years that defined the genre of "heist movie" for me early on. I love the ensemble cast and their dynamics, the tension of the main plot interspersed with the banter and quips. The set-pieces, the music, everything about a well executed heist movie like The Italian Job just makes me happy.
I also love a well executed superhero movie because of the fantastic action and fantastical powers in an unusual universe. Both quality genres. So guess why I love Ant-Man so much?
My first exposure to this movie, weeks before it was even released, was the soundtrack. I put it on, listened to the main theme, and I was immediately sold. It has a superhero theme, a strong melody appropriate for laying over a moment of enormous triumph in the face of impossible odds. But it plays that theme, for the vast majority of the movie, like it's trying to convince you you've accidentally put Mission Impossible on. It's heist music with a superhero theme, and that combination had me pretty much sold on the movie right from square one.
Actually seeing the movie did not disappoint. Ant-Man had so much opportunity to be campy garbage. It could very well have been a Captain America style origin story set during the Cold War, but it wasn't. Because thankfully some writer somewhere realized that Ant-Man, as a hero, has always been goofy. Just... always. So skip the overly-serious Hank Pym version of the character, and go straight to the goofy Scott Lang. Excellent choice. We didn't need any more background on the creation of the original Ant-Man than we got. Oh, and Scott is a burglar? Well heck, the Ant-Man suit is perfect for burgling stuff. And so that enterprising writer landed on trying to shoehorn a heist movie into the MCU.
Thank heavens for that writer.
By the time we got to Ant-Man, we'd had just a bunch of superhero movies. Marvel was releasing two a year, DC had gotten in on the action, X-Men was getting a soft reboot, and Sony had tried (and failed) to kickstart a Spiderman universe. We were absolutely inundated with superheroes, and to this point the closest anyone had gotten to bucking the trend was Guardians of the Galaxy (which was still a superhero movie, but also straight up a comedy). So I think it's fair to say we were ready for a change. Dropping a heist movie into the middle of everything turned out to be exactly the change we needed.
On the whole, the movie is maybe a bit less of an ensemble film than I'd like, but the ensemble is there, and they are entertaining. They all play their parts, and in the end the heist sequence (which turns into a superhero action sequence) is massively good fun. In addition to that, the character work is great. Scott's relationship with his daughter, ex-wife, and the cop step-father who is trying to put him in jail feels real and deals with some serious stuff. Hank's relationship with Hope is fantastic, raw, and comes across like an actual thing actual people with actual feelings would actually have. Darren Cross is... well, he's pretty one-note, though we're assured repeatedly by Hank that he did have a character arc at some point. But one-dimensional villains is really par for the course in any action film, and certainly heist movies, where they even have villains, aren't any stranger to the occasional megalomaniac.
The story works well, building up to the final heist with little incremental tasks and trainings that set up the climax of the film just great. It's a pretty ordinary progression for a heist movie, but just seeing a heist movie structure instead of the superhero structure we were all expecting will forgive a multitude of sins. The movie is mechanically well made, the effects are well done and holy cow are the CG ants pretty. Like, amazingly creepy, but in a few cases they managed to make ants look actually cute, so... kudos to the effects team on that one for sure.
The movie is excellent. The story is good, the characters are well handled, it looks great and the actors were all on point, it's just a really great heist movie. I have no idea how they're going to follow this up with Ant-Man and the Wasp, but you know what? I'm really hoping for another heist movie.
Just... please don't pull a Mission Impossible 2 on us.
I also love a well executed superhero movie because of the fantastic action and fantastical powers in an unusual universe. Both quality genres. So guess why I love Ant-Man so much?
My first exposure to this movie, weeks before it was even released, was the soundtrack. I put it on, listened to the main theme, and I was immediately sold. It has a superhero theme, a strong melody appropriate for laying over a moment of enormous triumph in the face of impossible odds. But it plays that theme, for the vast majority of the movie, like it's trying to convince you you've accidentally put Mission Impossible on. It's heist music with a superhero theme, and that combination had me pretty much sold on the movie right from square one.
Actually seeing the movie did not disappoint. Ant-Man had so much opportunity to be campy garbage. It could very well have been a Captain America style origin story set during the Cold War, but it wasn't. Because thankfully some writer somewhere realized that Ant-Man, as a hero, has always been goofy. Just... always. So skip the overly-serious Hank Pym version of the character, and go straight to the goofy Scott Lang. Excellent choice. We didn't need any more background on the creation of the original Ant-Man than we got. Oh, and Scott is a burglar? Well heck, the Ant-Man suit is perfect for burgling stuff. And so that enterprising writer landed on trying to shoehorn a heist movie into the MCU.
Thank heavens for that writer.
By the time we got to Ant-Man, we'd had just a bunch of superhero movies. Marvel was releasing two a year, DC had gotten in on the action, X-Men was getting a soft reboot, and Sony had tried (and failed) to kickstart a Spiderman universe. We were absolutely inundated with superheroes, and to this point the closest anyone had gotten to bucking the trend was Guardians of the Galaxy (which was still a superhero movie, but also straight up a comedy). So I think it's fair to say we were ready for a change. Dropping a heist movie into the middle of everything turned out to be exactly the change we needed.
On the whole, the movie is maybe a bit less of an ensemble film than I'd like, but the ensemble is there, and they are entertaining. They all play their parts, and in the end the heist sequence (which turns into a superhero action sequence) is massively good fun. In addition to that, the character work is great. Scott's relationship with his daughter, ex-wife, and the cop step-father who is trying to put him in jail feels real and deals with some serious stuff. Hank's relationship with Hope is fantastic, raw, and comes across like an actual thing actual people with actual feelings would actually have. Darren Cross is... well, he's pretty one-note, though we're assured repeatedly by Hank that he did have a character arc at some point. But one-dimensional villains is really par for the course in any action film, and certainly heist movies, where they even have villains, aren't any stranger to the occasional megalomaniac.
The story works well, building up to the final heist with little incremental tasks and trainings that set up the climax of the film just great. It's a pretty ordinary progression for a heist movie, but just seeing a heist movie structure instead of the superhero structure we were all expecting will forgive a multitude of sins. The movie is mechanically well made, the effects are well done and holy cow are the CG ants pretty. Like, amazingly creepy, but in a few cases they managed to make ants look actually cute, so... kudos to the effects team on that one for sure.
The movie is excellent. The story is good, the characters are well handled, it looks great and the actors were all on point, it's just a really great heist movie. I have no idea how they're going to follow this up with Ant-Man and the Wasp, but you know what? I'm really hoping for another heist movie.
Just... please don't pull a Mission Impossible 2 on us.
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