About 14 months ago, British director Edgar Wright quit Ant-Man just as shooting was about to start. He’d been working on the project for more than eight years. As well as directing, he’d written the script (along with Joe Cornish) and was a co-producer. Key crew went with him.

You’d forgive a studio for panicking. Marvel, however, didn’t. They barely blinked. It was, after all, as they stressed at the time, a joint decision, triggered by a last-minute emergence of “creative differences”. An alternative director was installed (Yes Man’s Peyton Reed), likewise other team members. The script was tweaked and the shoot went ahead as planned. They didn’t even move the release date.

If ever there was an outfit bigger than the talent it employs, it’s Marvel. Its slate is already scheduled through to 2028, and probably beyond. It has a master-plan, a road map for its cinematic universe, and it’s damned if it’s going to deviate – regardless of whether a film-maker who devoted nearly a decade to it is on board or not.

So: can you tell? Can you ever. Ant-Man is a cut-and-shut muddle, haunted by a ghost, produced by a high-end hot dog factory, by turns giddying and stupefying. Watching it is like channel-surfing between Hot Fuzz, a duff early 90s Michael Douglas drama and the very schlockiest bits of Interstellar.

Our hero is Scott Lang (Paul Rudd), fresh out of prison, a low-rent Robin Hood now determined to go straight for the sake of his young daughter. But he struggles to find work and so is persuaded by his – slightly questionably ethnic – criminal chums (one Italian, one Hispanic, one African-American, all bumbling wrong-uns) to break into the safe of millionaire Dr Hank Pym (Michael Douglas).



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But it’s a setup. Hank just wanted to check Scott had the skills required for an important task: to be shrunk via a special suit and then do battle alongside a troop of telepathically controlled ants. Their target is Hank’s former protege, Darren (Corey Stoll), who’s harnessed this special shrinking tech and aims to use it for nefarious ends.

So far, so promising. It’s one of Stan Lee’s wackier ideas, inherently humorous rather than hubristic. You can see why Wright might have liked it and what he might have done with it, in part because his hallmark is still all over it. A couple of lovely montages involving Scott’s pal, Michael Peña (the film’s highlight), are straight out of Shaun of the Dead, and climactic fights in a child’s bedroom and a briefcase are brilliantly conceived and wittily realised – a happy mix of left-field invention and mainstream wows. Given the success of last year’s Guardians of the Galaxy, you wonder why quirky seems to have suddenly made Marvel quite so queasy.

But other scenes are hopelessly inert, sagging beneath the weight of third-rate music cues and flaccid blocking. Rudd’s romance with a scientist called Hope (Evangeline Lilly) is flatter than a jam sandwich; she saddled with bad wig and whiny lines, his wryness sometimes a touch too remorseless.

Douglas, too, is on muted form – as mad scientists go, this one’s mighty bland. Stoll plays things very straight as Darren the baddie, and it’s a shame Judy Greer has gone from interesting indie star to perennially worried mum (as Rudd’s ex she basically reprises her concerned turn from Jurassic World). Though the child playing her and Rudd’s daughter is appealing, the father/sprog dynamic is just too blunt to affect.

And it’s in these shameless scenes the film seems most especially to ape Interstellar, especially during po-faced CGI excursions to the “quantum realm”. These were apparently post-Wright insertions; likewise the cameo appearance of another Marvel character. Ant-Man, this appearance serves to remind you, is copyrighted property. He belongs in a stable. You can understand the impulse to bolt.

• Ant-Man is released worldwide on 17 July