Cynics might suggest that you can’t tell much about a movie from its trailer. Yet last year’s promo for Marvel’s Guardians of the Galaxy, with its irresistible Blue Swede soundtrack and smart riff on the famous The Usual Suspects lineup sequence, proved a masterful example of the form and completely transformed expectations for the barmy cosmic superhero tale. James Gunn’s nutty little confection went on to make more money than Superman reboot Man of Steel at the global box office, a spectacular feat for a film about a bunch of little-known multi-coloured space weirdos.
Now comes the debut trailer for Marvel’s Ant-Man and, if Guardians of the Galaxy needed help to turn around public perceptions, this one surely requires one of the finest trailers ever seen in the history of Hollywood. Firing the fabulous Edgar Wright as director after more than half a decade of development, only to replace him with Yes Man’s Peyton Reed, has created spectacular negative buzz. And given that context, I’m afraid our first look at Paul Rudd as the diminutive superhero simply fails to stand tall.
The Ant-Man trailer
We see Michael Douglas as Dr Hank Pym, the original Ant-Man in the comics, explaining to Rudd’s petty criminal Scott Lang that he’s about to get a second chance as the titular hero. It’s pitched as a stirring speech set up perfectly for Lang to harpoon all that portentous tension by asking if the name is set in stone. But the Guardians trailer already pulled a similar self-referential trick when Chris Pratt’s Star Lord discovered nobody had ever heard of him - and produced far more laughs.
Advertisement
The rest of the rather low-key, low-energy trailer largely sees Rudd rollicking around the screen as Ant-Man, complete with trusty insect steed and shockingly unimpressive costume, which to me looks likes something from Doctor Who. It is utterly lacking in the full-blooded, warm-hearted razzamatazz of its predecessor.
Screenwriter Adam McKay (Anchorman) has admitted he rewrote the original screenplay by Wright and Joe Cornish in just six to eight weeks with the help of Rudd. “We just shaped the whole thing, we just tried to streamline it, make it cleaner, make it a little bigger, a little more aggressive, make it funnier in places – we just basically did a rewrite,” he told Collider last year, adding: “Edgar had a really good script. But we just had a blast, and Rudd was just so much fun to write with.”
If Wright and Cornish’s screenplay was so great in the first place, why did it need rewriting? The British pair have been reduced to a story credit on the final movie, and you have to worry that the Ant-Man that finally hits the big screen is going to be a dramatically diminished version of what it might once have been. Let’s hope this is one occasion when the trailer really doesn’t tell the full story.
