Ant-Man, Marvel superhero, gets into an Ocean’s 11 caper

The Marvel Cinematic Universe unleashes its pint-sized hero Ant-Man again in a good old-fashioned heist caper.

Paul Rudd with one of his six-legged assistants in Marvel movie Ant-Man.

Ant-Man is the latest offering from the Marvel Cinematic Universe and what a pocket rocket of a film it is, full of thrills, laughs and cool special effects. It’s not too violent (as the PG rating suggests) and almost devoid of the one thing guaranteed to make my 10-year-old adviser avert his eyes in horror: romance. It may also encourage you to tread more carefully when out and about, in recognition of the fact ants are people, too.

The Marvel films are known for their humour, for the self-aware banter between the ­superheroes. Ant-Man hasthat in spades, with comic actor Paul Rudd terrific in the title role, but is also more of an outright caper, a sassy, snappy heist movie that at its best crackles like Ocean’s Eleven. It’s directed by Peyton Reed, who stamped his comic credentials with The Break-Up, with Vince Vaughn and Jennifer Aniston, and the Jim Carrey vehicle Yes Man.

The plot is uncomplicated: Rudd is Scott Lang, an athletic thief trying to go straight so his estranged wife Maggie (Judy Greer) won’t stop him from seeing his young daughter. But scientist (and a previous Ant-Man) Hank Pym (a still punchy Michael Douglas) taps him for one last job: break into a high-security lab to stop the brilliant, mad Dr Darren Cross (Corey Stoll) from taking over the world.

Scott is kitted out in the Ant-Man suit, which allows him to shrink in size but increase in strength, and undergoes rigorous training with Dr Pym’s daughter Hope (Evangeline Lilly). There are some very funny moments here, including a reminder, for anyone who still needs one, that it’s unwise to tell a woman she doesn’t know how to throw a punch.

The sequences in which Scott is insect-sized and assisted by an army of ants, terrestrial and airborne, offer a brilliant inversion of perspective: Ant-Man dodging a vacuum cleaner, for example, or in a showdown with Dr Cross (suited up as the evil Yellow Jacket) on a child’s Thomas the Tank Engine set.

Fans will also relish a plot detour that brings the newbie Ant-Man into conflict with fully fledged superhero Falcon (Anthony Mackie). That scene, like the whole film, is full of outsized entertainment.

Jake Shreier’s Paper Towns, based on the 2008 young adult novel by American author John Green, is a humorous and engaging coming-of-age story that reminds us films about teenagers can be set in the ordinary here and now, not just the dystopian future.

The film does open with the idea of something otherworldly, however: a miracle. It’s hardly loaves-and-fishes territory.

Quentin Jacobsen thinks it’s miraculous that of all the houses in all the subdivisions in all the towns in suburban America, Margo Roth Speigelman moves into the one next to him. “From the moment I saw her I was hopelessly, madly in love.’’

They are fast friends through childhood, but in high school drift apart. Margot (English model turned actor Cara Delevingne) is a hot girl with a wild streak while Quentin (Nat Wolff) is an A-student who is perhaps too nice for his own good. Q, as he’s called, hangs out with his buddies Ben (Austin Abrams) and “Radar” (Justice Smith), and the repartee between the trio, joshing each other about their sexual non-conquests, is full of wit and warmth. It’s so real and believable that you’d swear the three young actors had been friends from childhood, with Abrams especially good. (I read he has the lead role in the planned film adaptation of DBC Pierre’s Booker Prize-winning high school shooting novel Vernon God Little, which seems ideal casting.)

Things seem to change for Q when Margot dragoons him into a night of daring exploits — removing the eyebrow of a sleeping jock and so on — to “rain vengeance’’ on her cheating football star boyfriend. This high-energy sequence is brilliantly done.

Q is more in love than ever and thinks there’s a chance it’s reciprocated, but Margot doesn’t come to school the next day. Indeed she has vanished, and this takes us to the heart of the film, an often hilarious road trip from Orlando, Florida, to upstate New York in search of the gone girl.

The paper towns of the title refer to the teenage sense of phoniness immortalised by JD Salinger’s Holden Caulfield but also to the non-towns cartographers put on maps to protect their copyright.

Paper Towns comes to the screen in the wake of the huge success of last year’s film version of one of Green’s more recent novels, the teen cancer sufferers love story The Fault in Our Stars. The reason he is so popular with his target audience, I think, is he writes about people, places and situations to which they can relate. He also has an admirable impulse to resist tidy endings, one that is respected by screenwriters Scott Neustadter and Michael Weber, who scripted both films.

This is a thoughtful, charming movie about young people on the threshold of adulthood coming to terms with what they are leaving behind, and what lies ahead.

Ant-Man (PG)

3.5 stars

National release

Paper Towns (PG)

3.5 stars

National release