Ant-Man (12)

THE climax of recent Marvel films are known for being quite a spectacle.

In Age of Ultron, the Avengers battle a robotic supervillain as he rips an entire city out of the ground in a bid to make humans extinct.

The finale of Guardians of the Galaxy involves a warship crash landing on a planet during a struggle for an object of immeasurable power

But Ant-Man takes things in a totally different direction, offering all the Marvel thrills at a fraction of the scale.

It has to be one of the only films that features a Thomas the Tank Engine train set in its final climatic scenes.

At certain moments, director Peyton Reed's movie feels more like something out of Wallace and Gromit than comic books – but in a good way.

He gets the tone just right with the well-placed humour as plentiful as the eye-catching action scenes.

Ant-Man stars Paul Rudd cat burglar Scott Lang in a story penned by British writers Edgar Wright and Joe Cornish.

After being released from prison, his latest score puts him in the path of Dr Hank Pym (Michael Douglas) who is trying to protect his 'Pym Particle' shrinking technology.

His former protege Darren Cross (Corey Stoll) wants to militarise the tech to create an army of tiny soldiers for infiltration and sabotage missions.

So it is up to Lang to save the day using Pym's Ant-Man suit that allows him to shrink at the touch of a button and even control ants using a device to tap into the hive mind.

It is the hammy stuff of old school sci-fi but what makes Ant-Man works is that film technology has caught up with the grand ideas.

Where the effects in films like Honey I Shrunk The Kids were limited, in this you will really believe a man has reduced to the size of an insect.

The only downside of the film is the producers' insistence on tying it in with the 'Marvel connected universe'. This element of the story just feels a bit crowbarred in.

DAVID MORGAN