Let's get small

Scott Lang (Paul Rudd, also credited as co-scripter) is a burglar with a Masters in electrical engineering. He gets out of San Quentin after doing time for some sort of genius Robin Hood caper. Scott finds he can’t even hold down a Baskin & Robbins starting position with his prison record, which is a problem since he needs a job and an apartment before he can apply for shared custody of his little girl, so he gets lured back into a burgling by his buddy Luis (Michael Peña, who gets the best laughs in the movie in twin sequences involving rapid-fire flashbacks and ridiculous lip-synching). But, a-ha!, the burgling was covertly masterminded by entomologist, physicist and former S.H.I.E.L.D. agent Hank Pym (Michael Douglas), who figured out how to “change the distance between atoms.” Which, as it turns out, is dangerous! It means that you can turn normal-sized guys into super-small super-soldiers, which is something Pym’s former protégé Darren Cross (Corey Stoll), with the aid of Pym’s foxy daughter Hope (Canada’s own Evangeline Lily), is hot to develop and sell to obviously nefarious fellows in suits. Thus Pym needs Scott to become Ant-Man, right? Complications ensue.

Sound complicated? It is! But no more so than your average super hero movie, which, it always seems to me, would work better as a super hero mini-series, since there are always at least three complete three-act narratives squashed into one of these tent-pole epics. Nevertheless, Ant-Man, directed by Peyton Reed (Bring It On) with the right balance of magnitude and irreverence, feels surprisingly fleet. The film could have done without several of the requisite plot twists or the entirely superfluous Avengers cameo, but these detours are made up for by some inventive set-pieces, including on that involves a giant Thomas the Tank Engine falling out of a suburban house while two guys the size of peas duke it out in the carpet jungle. Unlike some other recent spectacle films (e.g.: Terminator: Genisys), it helps immensely that Ant-Man has experienced actors with actual personalities in the lead roles, and it helps still more to have a writing team like that of Rudd, Edgar Wright, Joe Cornish and Adam McKay fleshing out the boiler-plate plot. Also: there are lots of actual ants doing heroic things. Let’s hear it for ending the cinema’s unjust tradition of demonizing ugly insects.

                         

Good cop, bad cop, batshit cop: The Other Guys

Two adrenaline junky celebrity cops dive 20 stories to their senseless deaths for no apparent reason other than the crazed bliss of suicidal recklessness. A punch-up breaks out at a funeral and everyone whispers while beating each other so as not to disturb the grieving guests. A guy gets loaded and eats a priest’s arm. A chopper’s taken out by an onslaught of golf balls. An NYPD captain moonlights at a bed and bath store to put his bisexual son through DJ school. Steve Coogan bribes investigators with tickets to Jersey Boys. These are some of the movie’s highlights, though they could just as easily be enjoyed as stand-alone slapstick shorts. Their being part of a feature film constitutes nothing beyond a convenient framing device.

It must be some kind of genuine praise when I confess that I dunno what to make of cop buddy gutbuster The Other Guys. When we talk about the necessity of approaching movies on their own terms rather than as variations on familiar templates, we typically do so with regards to relatively obscure or “difficult” movies in danger of vanishing into the art house fog, but this same re-negotiating of expectations can be applied to comedies. The Other Guys is a miserable failure at lots of things we typically consider essential. The narrative, for one, which seems to want to be some sort of satire at times, isn’t merely stupid, it’s also inconsistent, incoherent, and flamboyantly lumpy. But throughout film history we can find numerous comedies that work, sometimes beautifully, as nothing more than tautological accumulations of gag-assaults, knowingly absurd situations that are funniest when we realize they’re going absolutely nowhere—the Marx Brothers were at their best when using this tack. Mark Wahlberg and Will Ferrell get into a childish yet tense verbal sparring match based entirely around how animal versions of themselves could consume each other in a nonsensical food chain. The conversation is so silly, but they just keep at it until it seems utterly exhausted, and keep at it further still, until it’s not just funny all over again but actually funnier than it was to begin with. Like Van Morrison repeating a single lyric into blissful abstraction, these guys beat funny ideas to death so as to raise them from the dead.

The Other Guys was co-scripted and directed by Adam McKay, who helmed the earlier Will Ferrell loser comedies Anchorman, Talladega Nights and Step Brothers. The approach here is similar if perhaps more insane. This is busy, spastic, anxiogenic comedy, so the narrative isn’t really supposed to hold together. Wahlberg, as a humiliated high-strung peacock champing at the bit for some super-cop glory, and Ferrell, as the partner content to stay at his desk and quietly build cases against developers for neglecting to apply for scaffolding permits, do brilliantly funny things with the uneven material by making it all so deadly serious. Though its less recognized than Ferrell’s, Wahlberg has always had a very special gift for comedy—just go back to certain bits of Boogie Nights, the singing especially, or even the way he simply parks a bike in I Heart Huckabees—because he heroically hurls himself headlong into playing stakes rather than jokes. I was in tears at times. But for every well-drawn character there's one that just gets more half-assed with every new appearance—such as Eva Mendes as Ferrell's sketch of a spouse. For every inspired scene there’s another that falls drearily flat. Holding it all together is little more than our patient waiting for the next, hopefully better scene. Still, I’ll take this over a tediously over-manicured, story-edited-into-a-coma comedy any day of the week.