(Marvel)

“I ruined the moment, didn’t I?” Scott Lang (Paul Rudd) does ruin a touching human moment between Dr. Hank Pym (Michael Douglas) and his daughter Hope (Evangeline Lilly) in Marvel’s Ant-Man. Rudd may well have been confessing his part in almost ruining the movie.

Edgar Wright fans were disappointed when the Cornetto Trilogy director stepped down from his long-planned adaptation of the diminutive superhero. Wright’s screenplay, co-written with Joe Cornish, still survives, but it was re-written by Anchorman director Adam McKay and Paul Rudd. Some of the Wright touch is still there, but the movie is shaken loose from its moorings when it squeezes an Edgar Wright peg into an MCU hole. Like when in the middle of the film, Rudd, as if he’s suddenly in a different movie, breaks from the fairly self-contained human drama at play to invoke the franchise’s many-uddered cash cow: The Avengers.

Rudd the actor helps carry the weight of the film on his tiny shoulders, his benign persona a perfect fit to play our tiniest superhero. But if Rudd the script doctor ruined the moment, he didn’t quite ruin the movie. Still, from the point of view of someone who isn’t invested in the MCU, the quality of Ant-Man drops off most when it becomes a Marvel movie.

Ant-Man starts like the most human of origin stories. A preface introduces a younger Hank Pym (CGI Douglas) in 1989, furious that S.H.I.E.L.D. has tried to replicate the Pym particle that is the key to successful shrinking technology. Fast forward to today: Lang (Rudd) is getting punched out in a farewell ceremony before he’s released from San Quentin after doing time for burglary. He shows up at his daughter’s birthday party but is told he can’t have access until he shapes up. Desperately, he turns back to crime. Meanwhile, Pym returns to his old company to find that his smarmy bald protégé Darren Cross (Corey Stoll) has developed a prototype for the Yellowjacket, a size shrinking suit that essentially weaponizes Pym’s discovery.

The tiny hero is a curious animal in a world of hyper-capable superheroes, his power dependent not on being stronger but smaller. It’s more about hiding your talent than reveling in it. Hank Pym buried his gift, locking away his prototype Ant-Man suit for decades because he was afraid of its power—of his power. But Pym finds a new hope in Lang, luring the ex-con and his motley group of thieves into a heist movie whose target isn’t diamonds but an invitation to a smaller and better you, an invitation to save the world.

Lang discovers his new power in an unlikely but symbolic place: the bath. As his suit reduces him to the size of an insect, he’s in the shower, running for his life but also ready to be cleansed and use his gift not for burglary but for mankind. And the path to rehabilitation and vindication, to saving the world, is to get small. Also to gain the control of other insects to do your benevolent bidding.

As blockbusters go, Ant-Man is relatively sedate, its fastest-paced sequences not fight scenes (though there are a few of those) but comic routines in which Luis (Michael Peña) tells convoluted stories about who said what to who, all of them taking on Luis’ voice. One of the movie’s biggest set pieces is a child’s Thomas the Train set. This is a movie that encourages us to see the excitement and valor in little things.

When Wright announced that he was leaving Ant-Man, he tweeted, and then deleted, a photo of stone-faced Buster Keaton holding a Cornetto. When Keaton joined MGM and lost the creative control he had with his own independent studio, he called it “the worst mistake of my career.” Like Ant-Man, Wright stepping away from the big leagues may be his own way of saving his cinematic world: by keeping it small. He left his mark on a big movie with a strong little heart that’s good, but not as good as it could be simply because it’s not small enough.

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Ant-Man
Directed by Peyton Reed
Written by Edgar Wright, Joe Cornish, Adam McKay and Paul Rudd
With Paul Rudd, Michael Douglas, Evangeline Lilly, Corey Stoll
Rated PG-13 for sci-fi action violence and language
Opens today at a big theater near you.