There’s a scene in Ant-Man, Marvel’s latest and, perhaps, riskiest comic-book-to-movie adventure, that is full of sublime, silly fun. As Ant-Man (Paul Rudd) battles with his nemesis, Yellowjacket (Corey Stoll), they use their shrinking and enlargening (just go with it) technologies to fight, accidentally making small things around them—a bug, a toy—suddenly huge. The scene becomes a riot of sight gags as proportions and perspective shift calamitously, and the movie takes on the giddy air of excitement and playful wit that is Marvel Studios at its best. The trouble is, this scene arrives almost at the very end of the movie—the film takes far too long cracking the nut of its own wild possibility, finally finding its groove just as the credits are about to roll.

Marvel has been running such a huge, complex operation for almost a decade now that it was inevitable that a movie would eventually fall through the cracks. (Like an ant might!) Ant-Man began as a promising piece of larky counter-programming: Shaun of the Dead director Edgar Wright teaming up with funnyman Rudd to do a lighter, but no less rip-roaring, Marvel movie. I mean, it’s Ant-Man, for crying out loud. Marvel may have found a way to take even Thor, hammer-wielding sex god of space, seriously, but Ant-Man? A guy who, after donning a special suit, can shrink down to minuscule size while still maintaining crazy strength? That’s just silly, and, seemingly, Marvel knew that, so they set about making an honest-to-goodness comedy with smart, dark-minded Wright at the helm. Which wasn’t a bad idea at all. But then, Wright left the project amidst a clamor of creative differences, and the movie seemed dead for a time, only to be revived when Bring It On director Peyton Reed, no stranger to snappy humor but otherwise untested in this climate, signed on as a replacement.

Disappointingly, but perhaps inevitably, Reed never makes the movie his own; much of Ant-Man plays like Reed is just trying to make sense of the notes Wright left behind. (The script is credited to Wright, Joe Cornish, Rudd, and Anchorman director Adam McKay.) And while there are some inspired moments to be found, overall the film is slapped-together; not bad, certainly, but rushed and inarticulate. Jokes never quite hit their punch lines; plot strands are clunky and un-nuanced (even for Marvel). Without any real point of view animating the film, it’s hard to get a sense of why we’re watching this sideline diversion from the larger Avengers narrative. Guardians of the Galaxy, Marvel’s other Avengers-adjacent weird comedy, gleefully flung us far, far away, to a realm where comparisons to other Marvel movies became almost moot. Ant-Man hews much too closely, while still trying to be different, and ends up looking less like a delightfully oddball relative and more like an also-ran.

This is no fault of Rudd, really, who here is as charmingly, wholesomely sardonic as ever; though, I wish the movie let him play things a little looser. He’s saddled too heavily with a boring, who-cares plotline about proving to his ex-wife (Judy Greer, having an odd summer) that he can be a good dad to their daughter. Nor is Ant-Man’s failure the fault of the rest of the cast. Michael Douglas is effectively gravelly as the original Ant-Man, Hank Pym, who recruits Rudd’s Scott Lang to be the new tiny hero in order to stop Stoll’s mad tech executive from selling dangerous shrinking technology to the wrong people. (HYDRA, mainly.) Stoll is a great comic-book movie villain, kooky enough for the comics but human enough for the movies. Even Evangeline Lilly, out of the elf ears and into Bryce Dallas Howard’s Jurassic World bob wig (dyed black), manages to make her mark, despite being handed the same boring-girl part too many actresses in the Marvel movies are given.