Bobby Cannavale

Ant-Man

Director: Peyton Reed (2015)

Marvel Comics’ inch-high superhero springs into action but comes up short in this action heist caper.

After a difficult and rushed production, it arrives in cinemas labouring under a weak script, some surprisingly mediocre SFX and a mistaken if unwavering faith in the charisma of it’s leading man Paul Rudd.

What’s most impressive about Ant-Man is it manages to crawl to a conclusion despite the obstacles of bottomless plot holes and boulder sized inconsistencies strewn in it’s path.

This is busy, forgettable and easily the weakest addition to the Marvel Cinematic Universe.

Genius inventor Hank Pym (Michael Douglas) has created an Ant-Man suit. But after initial success he buried the research after a fatal accident.

He also discovered prolonged exposure to the suit’s active agent – the Pym Particle – causes psychological imbalance.

A beauty of steam punk design, the suit shrinks the wearer to ant sized dimensions while offering super strength.

It also seems to bestow a super leaping power and an imperviousness to injury.

Pym has also created a device to control ants giving the tiny warrior an airborne army to command.

However his former protege Darren Cross (Corey Stoll) is now a corporate boss and intends to use Pym’s technology to create a more powerful Ant-suit called Yellowjacket.

Cross wants to make a fortune selling Yellowjacket to evil military interests.

So Pym recruits cat burglar Scott Lang (Rudd) to use the Ant-suit to break into the highly guarded lab to steal back his data.

Lang is a pacifist do-gooder who’s estranged from his cute-button daughter and is short of cash.

Despite being more than qualified, Pym’s daughter Hope (Evangeline Lilly) is not best pleased at being overlooked for the dangerous mission.

Lily is mostly required to stand and stare. She’s allowed to punch Rudd in the face but is generally employed to look pretty and be the recipient of Rudd’s ‘charm’.

As her onscreen dad, Douglas is cinema’s most action-orientated tweed-wearing elderly professor since Dr Jones Senior.

The former Oscar winner manfully does what he can with the material.

Even at full size Rudd is an anonymous leading man, mugging his way through scenes.

He can’t blame the script after he contributed a great deal to it. He does award himself an undeserved kiss.

It’s unsurprising Rudd is absent from the best scene. It occurs early doors where a younger Pym (an effectively CGI’d Douglas) faces off to an aged Howard Stark and Agent Carter (John Slattery and Hayley Atwell).

Rudd’s only saving grace is that he isn’t Ryan Reynolds, an actor even more forgettable who is unfathomably presented with leading roles.

Reynolds has been gifted the lead in X-Men spin-off Deadpool (2015) – this after being awful as DC’s Green Lantern (2011).

Stoll is kinda playing the Jeff Bridges role in Iron Man (2008) but lacks the big man’s roaring presence.

He can’t generate sufficient evil intent even when literally leading lambs to the slaughter.

In extremely minor parts the excellent actors Bobby Cannavale and Judy Greer scowl and scold to order.

The action scenes are dull fights or concerned with Ant-Man being flushed along drainpipes or falling from heights.

They are parallel redemption tales of father’s reconnecting with their daughters.

But the film runs shy of engaging with it’s emotional core, possibly for fear of alienating its teenage boy fan base with icky feelings.

So it undercuts potentially tender scenes with Rudd’s gurning face, reducing our engagement.

Ant-Man experienced a difficult and eventually rushed production.

After working on a script since 2003, original director Edgar Wright – Shaun of the Dead (2004) – and co-writer Joe Cornish – Attack the Block (2011) – were jettisoned in May 2014 prior to principal photography.

Creative differences were cited and the pair were replaced on writing duties by Rudd and Adam McKay, Rudd’s director on Anchorman: The Legend of Ron Burgundy (2004).

Peyton Reed was dropped in as director and briefed to make the film conform more neatly to the Marvel movie template.

His most recent directorial effort was the weak but appropriately named Jim Carrey comedy Yes Man (2008).

Moments of Wright’s trademark zippy writing remain. So does his love of British pop culture in the form of Thomas the Tank Engine in a seemingly Hornby train advertisement-inspired set-piece.

Plus his deconstructive tendencies are apparent in Lang’s inept accomplices Luis, Kurt and Dave (Michael Pena, David Dastmalchian, Tip Harris).

They are respectively hispanic, Russian and black. Each are so typically reductive of unthinking Hollywood, it suggests Wright intended to use his sly wit to invert their behaviour and our expectations.

Sadly non of this happens because in Reed’s pliant corporate hands all subtlety and irony is lost.

The trio remain un-amusing ethnic stereotypes played for broad and laughter-free comedy.

It’s interesting Russian sits alongside hispanic and black as an ethnic ‘other’ in Hollywood eyes.

More entertaining and/or interesting films featuring tiny protagonists are The Incredible Shrinking Man (1957), Fantastic Voyage (1966), Innerspace (1987) and Honey I Shrunk The Kids (1989).

Them! (1954) and Antz (1998) offer larger amounts ant-related fun.

The best Marvel movies are expertly constructed entertainments who reach beyond their comic origins and core audience – but Ant-Man lacks ambition or wit and prefers to pander to its fan base of teenage boys.

It’s one good joke features British children’s character Thomas the Tank Engine – so if you’ve seen the trailer there’s no need to watch this.

★★☆☆☆

Spy

Director: Paul Feig (2015)

The world of espionage will never be the same after this enjoyable action caper smears poo and puke jokes over the glossy veneer of a James Bond parody.

As one-time 007 star George Lazenby once put it: ‘this never happened to the other fella‘.

Following the hugely successful Kingsman (2015), it’s the second Bond inspired movie of 2015. In October we’ll see Spectre, Daniel Craig’s last roll of the dice as the British spy.

It offers big budget foul-mouthed laughs though the blunt-edged comedy of leading lady Melissa McCarthy are more likely to dislocate your funny bone that tickle it.

It’s the third time after Bridesmaids (2011) and The Heat (2013) she’s teamed with writer/director Paul Feig but this time the result is less successful.

A nuclear bomb in a suitcase is being touted around the bad guys of Europe.

With key agents incapacitated the CIA are forced to send clumsy back-room computer operative Susan Cooper (McCarthy) undercover.

She is so unsuited to fieldwork she faints at the sight of blood and must fight not only heavily-armed bad guys – but her own inexperience and insecurity.

Decorated with the typical Bond furniture of casinos, helicopters, fast cars and gadgets, the plot moves briskly through the familiar locations of Paris, Rome and Budapest.

As Theodore Shapiro’s music reaches a satisfactory Bond-esque pitch, the action is technically well executed.

However it’s handled leniently by the editor; one explosion is seen from at least seven different camera angles.

If this is intended to be exaggeration for comic effect such as mastered by Paul Verhoeven in Robocop (1987) and John Landis in The Blues Brothers (1980), it’s insufficiently developed.

More likely it’s aping the current trend in editing for repeating the same shot from different angles to exploit the budget for maximum onscreen effect.

Either way it slows the pace and contributes to the generous running time. This lack of ruthlessness in the edit is a big problem and Spy keeps repeating it.

The unnecessary appearance of rapper 50 Cent is another example, as is the weary repetition of an excellent joke about the consequences of having an Operations room in a basement.

There’s a great knife in a kitchen with glamorous assassin Lia (Nargis Fakhri) where comedy and action combine instead of competing – the film would be much improved with more scenes like it.

Jude Law’s champagne swilling tuxedo’d super-spy Bradley Fine offers a glimpse of a James Bond we’ll never have.

The British star is happy to send himself up as the vainest man on the planet but labours under an American accent and a script offering him few decent lines.

Fortunately Jason Statham and Peter Serafinowicz abseil in with expertly calibrated comic performances and rescue the Americans from a mire of directorial appeasement.

Their deranged performances steal their every scene. Rick Ford (Statham) is a barking mad rogue agent while Aldo (Serafinowicz) is an undercover Italian operative with unsuppressed passions.

It’s fair enough the men are vain idiots and the women do the actual work – but Spy seems overly-pleased with itself for this reversal and the result is more indulgence.

Miranda Hart riffs on her TV persona as Cooper’s dowdy sex-starved colleague Nancy B. Artingstall. She’s a not-so best friend who’s happy to embarrass Cooper in front of glamorous agent Karen Walker (Morena Baccarin in not much more than a cameo).

As criminal mastermind Rayna Boynaov, Aussie actress Rose Byrne dresses up in a cut-glass accent and trashy outfits and commendably commits herself to ridicule in a broad performance.

McCarthy’s a fine and engaging actress who capably charts the journey from put upon underling to confident ass-kicker. But her ad libbing is rarely as funny as the film thinks it is.

A running joke sees McCarthy in a variety of terrible outfits and looking at one point not unlike Dawn French in the Vicar Of Dibley. One or two inspired lines aside, she’s also about as funny.

★★★☆☆

Danny Collins

Director: Dan Fogelman (2015)

Al Pacino goes full showbiz as a jaded rock star seeking redemption in this entertaining comedy drama.

It’s vaguely based on the true story of folk singer Steve Tilston who belatedly received a letter from John Lennon long after the Beatle’s death.

Although unforgivably sentimental fluff, it’s saved by the talent and charm of its cast.

Plus the soundtrack of John Lennon’s greatest hits doesn’t hurt.

Danny Collins (Pacino) lives in a world of private jets, fast cars, mansions and age-inappropriate women.

In a girdle, fake tan and stack heels he looks alarmingly like TV’s David Dickinson on dress down Friday.

But Danny is weary from playing his greatest hits to his ageing fan-base.

His insufferably catchy pop anthem ‘Hey Baby Doll’ (written by Ciaran Gribbin and Greg Agar) sounds like something Neil Diamond would have discarded as too populist.

On Danny’s birthday his manager Frank (Christopher Plummer) gifts him a framed letter bought from a memorabilia collector.

It was written by John Lennon – but never delivered – 40 years earlier.

It inspires Danny to abandon his tour, give up drugs and drink (sort of) and check into a cheap hotel to start writing songs.

He also wants to correct his life’s mistakes and reaches out to his estranged son Tom (Bobby Cannavale).

Jennifer Garner plays Tom’s knowingly sweet wife Smantha.

Through sparky banter with hotel manager Mary (Annette Bening) Danny rediscovers his muse and his mojo.

The engaging actors plough their years of craft and experience into making their performances seem natural and effortless.

It’s an enjoyably loose performance from Pacino who refrains from his usual hoohah histrionics and is all the more engaging for it.

One wonders how much autobiography drew Pacino – himself a titan of 1970’s cinema and hasn’t had the most successful run in the last twenty years – to the role of a man who was huge in the 70’s and has been coasting on former glories ever since.

Pacino is very generous towards his co-stars, allowing them to dominate scenes and has his thunder stolen repeatedly by a motor-mouthed moppet; Tom’s precociously cute daughter, Sophie (Giselle Eisenberg).

Pacino’s not a terrible singer but he’s forced to growl his way through a dirge called ‘Don’t Look Down’ like a latter-day Johnny Cash.

The script holds up John Lennon as a paragon of artistic integrity – which is interesting as his musical estate is the biggest sell-out in the movie.

It also lacks confidence in being able to sell it’s tale of redemption to the audience, so it throws in ADHD (Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder) and cancer to keep our sympathies on board.

This isn’t hugely successful as Danny’s solution to any problem is to throw money at it or write a song – not options many people can identify with.

As a result the film runs out of steam and ends abruptly – with the happy benefit of not out-staying its welcome.

★★★☆☆