Antboy is a film that cannot live without the knowledge of the contemporary superhero film genre, the audience has to love it with all its cliches. It beats on the time sequence almost identical to Sam Raimi’s first Spider-Man movie. From comic book style oscar-winning titles, and the epilogue narration, and related insufficient moral, of using abilities selfishly from the start to gaining the virtue of a hero in the end, Antboy fills the template of the father of all superhero movies so to speak.
Still, it somehow finds its own voice. It recognizes that it is not the first film of its kind; Spider-Man, Superman, Thor, and yes also Ant-Man are all clearly present in the films universe, which in the transition to this new with some dark humor ceases to be indulging towards Spider-man for kids and rather becomes Kick-Ass for kids.
Pelle Nohrmann (Oscar Dietz) is socially withdrawn twelve-year-old who is unnaturally inclined toward being in the company of himself after being infected to an experiment by a formic somewhere known as the ant (anyone interested in The Fly more than a little?). Enter Wilhelm (Samuel Ting Graf), a comic book enthusiast (‘geek’ sounds insulting) who helps the young lad become provisionally rather busy in a superhero game and marketing himself as a kid crimefighter Antboy. One day, a classmate of Pelle, Ida (Amalie Kruse Jensen ) comes up to this boy, now known as Antboy, for help. His sister, who has been kidnapped and who happens to be Pelle’s heart’s desire when it comes to girls – Amanda (Cecilie Alstrup Tarp) has also been kidnapped. Pelle has to act.
Standing few years younger than the wacky character of Peter Parker helps this movie quite a lot, it needs no arguments to assert. Their attempts at using Pelle’s recent instincts for crime fighting are childlike, child fitting, child silly. Everyone has a ridiculous first crime stop. It is quite understandable that Kumar attempts to do some Spider-Manish stretching while talking to his female colleague was horrible. And it must be quite deliberate. This is exactly that awful ability which attributes today to Antboy character, though and unconsciously at some point of blowing the viewer quite a lot with excessive emotions.
The biggest fault is caused by the film’s antagonist – The Flea (Nicolas Bro) – who appears to be acting in a separate production from the other juvenile performers. He is deadpan and delivers dialogue, including over-extended villainous speeches, stock lines that are meant to be over the top… which in turn makes the movie take a step back just when it begins to find its rhythm about halfway through. Antboy consists of self parody and tribute and it is fun when it does that but when it becomes super trump card and goes for The Flea, it is just a B movie version of what looked promising.
In the end, however, the film, Antboy, is very entertaining and children would enjoy watching it. It subscribes to that old and appealing framework of ‘what if’ – what if I could have super powers? What if I could be a superhero? What if I became some kind of super hero and was able to please my crush? The illusion or innocence of Antboy offers perhaps his best value proposition. Most of us can relate to Pelle’s narrative of being an ant in a world of giants even before he receives powers and especially how he is in love with a girl who doesn’t even see him – the boy, the ant. Most of the time anyway. It is quite a lot of exciting and indeed quite a lot of maturing that one has to go through and learn Antboy’s doctrine of “With great power…” is not much of a surprise for those who familiarized myself with the movie from the very beginning.
Verdict
Those looking for a whole family entertainment in the superhero genre that will be suitable for kids at the same time Antboy may be more advisable than the vast majority of superhero feature films which wish and aim primarily at adults.
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