Bugged Life: ANT-MAN AND THE WASP: QUANTUMANIA

For those of us who complain the superhero spectacles of the Marvel Cinematic Universe are getting rote and bland, Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania acknowledges our complaints with the sight of a supervillain admitting, of the Avengers, “they all blur together after a while.” Credit director Peyton Reed, then, for trying to keep his Ant-Man adventures a little distinct. The first two had their chintzy cross-overs and obligatory mega-franchise stewardship, but also had some panache as flimsy heist movies in which people and objects shrink and grow in clever, silly ways. This one plunges headfirst into a relatively straightforward adventure. Paul Rudd’s eponymous hero accidentally gets pulled into the Quantum Realm with his daughter (Kathryn Newton), his superhero girlfriend, Wasp (Evangeline Lilly), and her parents (Michael Douglas and Michelle Pfeiffer). The movie’s just about a journey to an exit that takes them through weird landscapes and kooky designs—talking goo, living buildings, fuzzily CG’d big-headed robot flunkies—on a collision course with an exiled multi-verse hopping conqueror. That’s Jonathan Majors’ Kang, last seen in the pretty fun Season 1 of Loki. This variant of the villain hopes to use Ant-Man tech to escape his sub-atomic prison. The result is diverting enough, a straightforward adventure through computer effects. 

It’s what, in the olden days, might’ve been a stop-motion odyssey through loosely adapted Greek myths or recreations of Jules Verne’s deep dives. Here, though, this weekend matinee approach is given over to Jack Kirby creatures in a vaguely Star Wars-ian side-quest plot captive to the MCU house style of functional blocking and brightly-lit fantasy. It strands likable actors in warehouse-sized virtual environments and has them interact with ping-ponging zaps and splats. The stakes are simple and the emotions paint-by-numbers—Rudd wants to protect his daughter; the rest want to help; the villain schemes and steams. But I found the whole project pleasant enough, at least less of a calamity than certain recent Marvel jumbles. It’s all of a piece, a direct line from beginning to end with a coherent energy and a streamlined style. I especially liked the easygoing heroes’ contrast with the heavy charisma of Majors, who sells the antagonist with enough sturdy screen presence that I won’t mind seeing him pop up in a half-dozen more of these. And Reed is allowed a few fine visual gambits—from a clever no-man’s land of multiplying possibilities that leaves a gazillion Ant-Men swarming on screen, to a reasonably satisfying ant-ex-machina to save the day. Sure, the MCU projects all blur together, but this one’s hardly the biggest failure.

Small Wonder: ANT-MAN

The lightest and slightest in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, Ant-Man steps away from the main Avengers for a pleasant diversion introducing a new superhero. It does so without the belabored setup, grindingly monotonous effects, and constipated cross-pollinated plotting that encumbers so many of its kind. Instead, it gives most of its runtime over to a simple, straightforward plot, embracing goofy comic book technologies and funny supporting performances. Turns out locating the inherent silliness in this material is exactly the right approach, even if it gets tangled up from time to time in its larger expanded franchise and caught flat footed with the creeping sameness in the flavorless look infecting all of these MCU projects. Still, for a big budget summer spectacle, this one passes by surprisingly quickly and does its best to avoid lumbering.

Perhaps Marvel has realized their best films in the franchise steer towards the casual and comedic. That’s why the best parts of the Thors, Iron Mans, and Captain Americas (not to mention Guardians of the Galaxy, which has yet to be Avengersed) take themselves lightly, with quipping banter and nice sight gags, and the worst parts are the endless bland action and portent. Ant-Man, directed by Peyton Reed (of Bring it On) and written by Edgar Wright (The World’s End), Joe Cornish (Attack the Block), Adam McKay (Anchorman) and star Paul Rudd, maintains its sunny tone and brisk high spirits, never giving itself over to thundering exhaustion. Rudd, one of the most charming actors working today, centers the movie on a tone of easy-going amusement, even when confronted with peril. It’s a nice change of pace.

Rudd plays a burglar whose attempts at going straight are halted when a wealthy retired tech genius (Michael Douglas) persuades him to help steal his shrinking technology from a cold capitalist (Corey Stoll). To do so, the inventor will let his new thief friend borrow his old top-secret superhero suit, a portable shrinking device that’ll turn its wearer into Ant-Man. The following is a loping heist picture as the two men look over blueprints, and engage in brisk training montages. But what good is it to be so small? Well, it gives Ant-Man super-strength, plus the ability to slip into a maximum-security research facility undetected. Rudd casts an amused skeptical gaze on the proceedings, quick with a fumbling everyman charisma. He interacts with Douglas’s stern mentor, as well as Evangeline Lilly as the old man’s no-nonsense daughter, by pinging off their seriousness with an irreverence obviously masking bewilderment.

By playing up the strangeness of being thrown into these circumstances, the movie finds an appealing groove. After all, it’s not every day you see the world from a bug’s-eye view. Reed has good fun conjuring the look of the everyday world towering over the miniaturized Ant-Man. It’s a likable callback to The Incredible Shrinking Man or Fantastic Voyage or Honey, I Shrunk the Kids. There are immense blades of grass, cavernous vents, vast puddles, and, of course, large, lovable, trainable herds of ants. It has a chintzy matinee spectacle appeal togged up with digital gloss. Plus, it’s funny to see big, booming adventure intercut with humdrum still life. When Rudd first tries on the suit, he ends up hanging onto a groove in a record as it spins on a turntable. In sweaty close-up he grasps and gasps. Cut to a wide shot as the needle skips. There’s some wit to the staging, and it only escalates as the danger grows.

Even more so than in the similarly mildly flippant Guardians, Ant-Man’s comedic tone is maintained throughout. It’s stuck in rigorous franchise making, with the worst scene a shoehorned cameo from an Avenger. But it’s still just loose enough to accommodate the pleasures of letting the cast’s chemistry simmer. It helps that supporting roles are filled by the likes of Michael Peña (a delight), T.I., Bobby Cannavale, and (an underutilized) Judy Greer. Reed keeps the plot – a limber heist laced with family issues – hopping along, trusting this ace cast to maintain high levels of appealing personality. By the time we arrive at the inevitable climactic battle, it’s tweaked with real levity – actual funny throwaway lines and teasing use of effects – and allowed to end before overstaying its welcome. Sparingly and creatively deploying the unusual superpowers in clever ways for fast, lean setpieces, its motions don’t grow tiresome. There’s simplicity to this movie that allows it to remain light on its feet. Sometimes thinking small pays off.

The End: THE HOBBIT: THE BATTLE OF THE FIVE ARMIES

The Hobbit: The Battle of the Five Armies is easily the weakest of its trilogy, and by far the worst of Peter Jackson’s Middle Earth movies. It’s all climax, an endless battle that does nothing that couldn’t have been accomplished with an extra fifteen or twenty minutes in the last one. And yet, this is likely the last time we’ll get to visit Tolkien’s fantasy world through Jackson’s eyes. For those of us who’ve liked that feeling, it’s bittersweet to see it go. That it’s not as rousing and wistful as the first finale, eleven years ago with The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King, is almost beside the point. It’s one more chance to go there and back again, to see these landscapes and creatures, marvel at the prodigious attention to detail, and hear the strains of Howard Shore’s melodies, a feat of film scoring nearing John Williams’ Star Wars work for its web of themes. In other words, it’s worth seeing for those who’ve already made it this far.

So maybe it’s helpful to think of Battle of the Five Armies less as a self-contained movie, more as a way for Jackson to create this place on the big screen for the last time. It’s a bestiary: Hobbits, elves, dwarves, orcs, horses, elk, giants, wizards, goblins, evil spirits, war bats, giant eagles, bears, a dragon, and more. It’s a map: CGI armies marched around a game board battlefield. It’s an armory: swords, shields, helmets, hammers, clubs, battering rams, bow and arrow. It’s a drawn out conclusion from a creator who doesn’t want to let this story go, who wants to linger in Middle Earth for just five more minutes, then five more, then more. Good thing, then, that Jackson’s skilled with whipping up blockbuster spectacle, splashing his vivid visuals across the wide screen in ceaseless fantastical imagery so big it betrays how small the thinking is of so many of our tentpole directors. Sure, he’s a filmmaker who errs on the side of too much of a good thing – endless stalemates, overdone comic relief – but so be it.

This last Hobbit picture picks up right where the last left off, with the dragon Smaug (Benedict Cumberbatch) emerging from his mountain lair, flying angrily toward the nearest village and leaving his vast stockpiles of gold unattended. In the mountain are the dwarves (led by Richard Armitage), who have a historical claim to the site, and Bilbo Baggins (Martin Freeman), the Hobbit who helped them get there. Eventually, the riches are the target of attack by an army of men (led by Luke Evans) and an army of elves (Lee Pace, Orlando Bloom, and Evangeline Lilly among them) who want their fair share. The army of orcs right behind them just wants to kill a bunch of people for some reason. I know that’s only three armies, four when you count the dwarves reinforcements, but I must confess I’m not exactly sure how the title’s math works out here.

For the first half of the movie, those computer-animated armies line up behind character actors as everyone argues about who gets the gold and how the fighting’s going to start. Then, the fighting starts, and the armies collide repeatedly in anonymous garbles of digital noise across rocks and fields, up and down the sides of cliffs, and across an icy lagoon. We dip into personal conflicts between recognizable orcs and our big heroes, follow the king of the dwarves and his battle with curse-induced greed, and check in with Gandalf (Ian McKellen) who has important Lord of the Rings foreshadowing to take care of before joining the main battle. Some moments of combat are nicely done – the bit with ice is clever, as is a neat trick involving an elk – but it grows awfully repetitive. You can almost hear the small material as it’s stretched thin to fill time.

The film loses the emotional thread, and its central narrative momentum along with it, as it gets tangled up in the clanging swords, stabbing and bludgeoning. But when the camera comes to rest on Bilbo Baggins, with Freeman's performance as good as always, the film finds its center. He’s taken aback by the developments, is ready to help his friends even when they disagree with his strategy, and bravely stands in the thick of it even when danger is great. When it’s all over, he is happy to have had this experience and even happier to go home. And so Five Armies brings him there, eventually. It wraps up dangling plot threads, resolves its cliffhangers, and joins up with the beginning of Fellowship of the Ring quite nicely. Along the way we have to slog through some colossally uninvolving battle business, but Jackson brings it home, to the Shire and the Hobbits, the coziest corner of Middle Earth, safe and sound. He asks your indulgence, tries your patience, but eventually delivers some small rewards.

Into the Fire: THE HOBBIT: THE DESOLATION OF SMAUG

Peter Jackson returns yet again to J.R.R. Tolkien’s fantastical Middle Earth with The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug, the second of three films devoted to the comparatively slim novel that precedes The Lord of the Rings trilogy. Some find that reason enough to dislike the film, but why get hung up on what it isn’t and miss the chance to luxuriate in what it is? To dismiss the expansion of Tolkien’s smaller story is to miss the rich detail Jackson and co-writers Fran Walsh, Philippa Boyens, and Guillermo del Toro find. This is filmmaking as worldbuilding, a creation of a space that’s fun to visit with new characters and sights around every corner. When we wander into the home of a giant man who is also sometimes a bear, there is a sense of discovery and history. It feels somehow right that such a person would exist in this world, and as he sadly admits to being the last of his species, there’s a real sense of loss. We could follow him out into his own film and probably find something interesting. We won’t, but the sense of a fully realized world is impressive and goes a long way to selling the movie’s colorful adventure plotting.

When last we saw our Hobbit friend Bilbo Baggins (Martin Freeman), he was with the once and future dwarf king Thorin Oakenshield (Richard Armitage) and his band of dwarves on a journey to enter the Lonely Mountain and reclaim their home and their gold from Smaug, a powerful dragon. They’re continuing their quest here, getting into one scrape after another, each only a danger for as long as the plot requires (and sometimes longer) until the next danger pops up. Here there be giant spiders, packs of angry orcs, aloof wood-elves, and, of course, one large fire-breathing dragon. He stretches across the entire screen that only captures his full wingspan in wide shots. (The beast is voiced by Benedict Cumberbatch, words rumbling out with booming augmented bass.) Expert spectacle, the film is filled with elaborate action sequences overflowing with visual gags. In one early scene, an elf shoots two orcs with one arrow. Later, a barrel pops up out of roaring rapids and rolls over baddies on the shore, Rube Goldberg serendipity aiding our heroes.

Also helping (and sometimes threatening) our heroes are two elves – one, Orlando Bloom, a familiar face from The Lord of the Rings, the other, Evangeline Lilly, added to give the film a gentle wispy subplot about a dwarf who has a crush on her and maybe, just maybe, vice versa. Together they happen to form a reason to have a few more action sequences. One, a tight, claustrophobic nighttime fight in a tiny house, is a nice break from the sweeping New Zealand vistas and cavernous caves. Speaking of subplots, there’s much to do about a dilapidated lake town where the dwarves find help from a human (Luke Evans) who, it’s quickly apparent, has made a habit of defying the orders of the town’s grumpy, selfish ruler (Stephen Fry). Between the elves and the lake town, the quickly sketched politics and history of this fantasy world is a pleasure. Each new location we step into feels fully formed before we got there, and has the surety that it will continue long after we leave.

There’s always something. Compared to The Lord of the Rings end-of-Middle-Earth stakes, this Hobbit, much like the last Hobbit, is lighter fare, bouncier and zippier. But the mythic resonance of these displaced dwarves and archetypical character types – the strong one, the silly one, and smitten one, the brave one – give the whole picture a fine kick. Freeman’s Bilbo is especially sympathetic, in over his head, but trying so very hard to stay brave and get braver. Our heroes are so very likable, we want to see them succeed. And the sights Jackson shows us are so wonderful and varied, it’s clear Middle Earth is a place worth fighting for. At one point Bilbo sits atop a tree, hundreds of butterflies taking wing around him as he looks across a sun-dappled skyline, a shimmering lake in the distance and, further on, a misty mountain. I’d go there and back again any day.

Rarely diverting its attention from the one-thing-after-another journey of the dwarves, Jackson occasionally drifts away with the wizard Gandalf (Ian McKellen). I’m not sure what sidetrack he’s wandering down, but that he at one point appears to be fighting a big black cloud tells you everything you need to know about just how seriously to take this. That is to say, enough to feel it, but not so much you can't smile at sillier touches, sometimes both at once. It’s a grand sweeping adventure built out of mythic components, a sense of its own history, and ripe B-movie fantasy. I had to smile when the king of the wood elves (Lee Pace) shows up wearing a crown made out of branches. It just makes sense. Best approached by responding to the surface pulpy fantasy and letting the big emotion underneath grow and bubble, The Desolation of Smaug is all about creating a world, giving space to get lost in it, and allowing plenty of time to do so.

This is epic, light-hearted fantasy as bustling adventure. Jackson’s a sharp enough visual filmmaker to give us movie pleasures of the highest order. A big highlight is that dragon Scrooge McDuck-ing it up in a pile of gold, slowly revealed in his enormity through coy editing. But even simple visual moments, like a shot that finds a worried little girl in the foreground, unaware of the orcs prowling the rooftops behind her, silhouetted in the background, is a great punch of imagery, simple and true. This may be a film that paints in broad strokes, but the surface details are colored in beautifully. It actually delivers the blockbuster exhilaration, the immense pleasures of expansive spectacle, so many films promise, but so few deliver. Jackson, like Steven Spielberg and George Lucas, Guillermo del Toro and James Cameron, knows how to build gigantic special effects and cohesive worlds into something that carries real weight and lots of fun.

Rock 'Em Sock 'Em: REAL STEEL

Real Steel takes place in a time in the near future, a mere fourteen years from now, when boxing will become a sport of the past. Because of an ever increasing audience demand for carnage and destruction – the boxing equivalent of going to NASCAR for the crashes – and because of leaps and bounds in the field of robotics, boxing will be a sport for souped-up humanoid robots, controlled by their owners to beat each other until sparks and oil splatter all over the ropes. This is miles from Robot Wars a TV show from about a decade ago that sent what were essentially Roombas with rotary saws crashing into each other. The boxing of Real Steel is boxing as we know it today with the same rules and the same rings, but the athletes have gone the way of the factory worker. Instead of testing the limits of the human body, robot boxing tests the limits of cold, hard steel. It’s a wonder the crowds at these events aren’t wearing earplugs.

The film follows a down-on-his-luck, debt-burdened robot manager (Hugh Jackman) who just can’t catch a break. In the opening scene, he pulls up to a small town fair where he’s hoping to make a little money by pitting his fighter against a bull and wagering a sizable sum with the event’s promoters. Minutes later, his robot’s impaled by a horn and scattered across the arena. The promoters expect him to pay up so he skips town. As he’s escaping, he receives word that his old girlfriend has died, which leaves the eleven-year-old son (Dakota Goyo) he’s never met in need of a guardian. Pulling up to the courthouse, he convinces his ex’s sister (Hope Davis) to give him a few months with his son, just for the summer.

This seems like two disparate plotlines, but they’re drawn together when the boy shows a talent for helping his dad, and his dad’s robo-gym landlord (Evangeline Lilly), work to get their robots in fighting shape. (It’s explained away with an off-handed reference to video games, ‘cause kids like those, right?) So the working-poor underdog, a former human pugilist who has found his talent displaced and unexploited, struggling to make ends meet and turn his life around, is encouraged by his son to try one last time to make a go of robot boxing. It’s not too subtle, but I liked how the robots become metaphors through which the father and son work out their individual problems and eventually bond. But the old fighting robot has been rendered unusable by a bull’s goring, so first they need to find a ‘bot. Then, they need to get him to fight with the best of them.

It’s a testament to the power of clichés done right that the film works so well. The two appealing performances from the leads ground the proceedings in a nice, heightened Hollywood approximation of human emotion. Jackman, with plenty of big star-power charisma, and Goyo, with engaging boyish energy, play off each other well. The remarkable blend of practical and digital effects works well for the robots. The believable blending between the worlds of man and machine creates a reasonably credible, if more than a little silly, sci-fi world for what is essentially a standard boxing movie.

The movie’s screenplay comes from John Gatins who has two baseball movies, one basketball movie, and a horseracing movie to his credit. He knows just the path to set the movie on and piles up the conflict in the usual ways. The underestimated little robot the father-son duo finds, fixes, and trains works his way up the ranks. They start in gritty underground matches played against scary punks with no rules in roadside bars, dark clubs and back-alley warehouses, before they fight their way into higher stakes and bigger money. In solid sports movie fashion, the stakes grow as we charge forward to the Big Fight with a popular, scary champion with boo-worthy corporate backers. Each new match makes the widescreen spectacle all the more eye-catching with massive crowds, large stadiums, and plenty of neon lighting and pounding bass. It may be a bit predictable (when it comes to figuring out where this goes, do you need a roadmap?) but it’s also enjoyable. I found the matches just as, if not more, thrilling and involving as any of the fights in last year’s Oscar-winning boxing movie The Fighter.

The sci-fi specifics may be a little fuzzy, the characters archetypes, and the plot a compilation of sports film’s greatest moments, but Real Steel is a big pleasing popcorn movie. It’s loud and kind of dumb, but it’s also appealing, exciting, and more or less satisfying. Director Shawn Levy, he of the Cheaper by the Dozen and Pink Panther remakes and two Night at the Museum movies, has stepped out of his (bad) family-comedy comfort zone to make a comfortable big budget picture. With its warm father-son dynamic and surprisingly convincing robot effects deployed for a sturdy formula adequately told, the film has a pleasant feel. The look is glossy and confident. The pace is brisk but deliberate yet exciting. It’s a fun entertainment machine, an enjoyable couple of hours that tells a story through robots beating the living steel out of each other for characters I cared about.