This review is not for spoilers, for cameo details, for post-credit scenes. You want those? Go here. Or actually see the film on its release in just over a week.

Ant-Man is a family film, in both senses of the word. You’ll get a couple of gaks, but that’s all – and I’m not talking about the kids you brought with you. There is no sexuality to speak of really. And what violence there is, is generally stylised, cartoony and, frankly wondrous. Those who thought Jurassic World was too much – and it was – should have fewer issues here.

Not that there aren’t mature ideas, there are. The film is about two families, the Pyms and the Langs, who have nothing to connect them save idealism, and both have fallen foul of it. Hank Pym who lost his wife and then figuratively lost his daughter then also lost his company. Scott Lang lost his freedom, his marriage and self respect as a father.

So Scott, a prisoner in San Quentin, after defrauding a corporate company of the very money they defrauded from their customers, Scott Lang is an Occupy Robin Hood who can’t catch a break or get any visitation rights until he can pay maintenance. His young daughter Cassie utterly loves him but his wife has moved on and what’s more they are both living with a cop.

Hank Pym needs a man for an inside job against Cross, a man he once treated like his son. But won’t risk his daughter. And Scott will risk everything for the chance to be with his daughter again. And maybe find a brand new family as well…

But what about the ants?

Well, the ants are pretty great and knock every other shrinking film of this type, even though there is a nod to feeding ants droplets of water from Honey I Shrunk The Kid. But they look great, and they are treated as soldiers, as tanks, and with the Carpenter Ants, as helicopters, the beat of their wings audibly replicating the whirr of windblades, and performing extractions straight out of Vietnam movies. It’s an attitude mirrored in a scene where Ant-Man is being shot at, repeatedly, and it plays out like someone running across No Man’s Land in World War One. And that’s what probably makes this film distinct.

Because this is a superhero movie. It is also a heist movie. It is also a war movie. It is eve also a Western. And it also a comedy, with thankfully more of the slapstick coming in towards the end, as the differences in the small and large world get contrasted for comic effect. Those are the pieces I think people are going to most remember and be grateful that they saw.

But certain key scenes are set up, teased and foreshadowed so much that I might as well spoil them here as you’ll be able to guess them the moment the first thing happens. It gets really obvious in what the eye is drawn to. It didn’t make me feel clever, it made the film seem dumber.

As for the 3D, I’m generally pretty 3D-phobic, but once my brain settle in, I wasn’t thrown out of it constantly as I was in Age Of Ultron. The 3D here is mostly handles responsibly and with purpose, as Paul Jenner said in the introduction, letting you shrink alongside Ant-Man. So you see the wide vistas, the differences in scale and are immersed in them before you are ripped out to see things from a macro perspective. Time after time, that works a treat.

Some logic flaws did jump out. An imperfect shrinking device that turns organic material to goop would make a rather nifty weapon right there, it could be sold to SHIELD as-is. Hell you could weaponise the shrinking process to attack the enemy by shrinking their tanks, buildings, cities away to nothing. Also the Yellowjacket suit looks like it could go up against Iron Man full sized. There is te suggestion of chemical imbalance but for Darren Cross, a villain who shows all sorts of smarts not usually associated with his type, he’s not looking at the big picture.

Badumtish.

And of course, as you’d expect some very dodgy science that gets steamrolled over in favour of some damn fine scenes. But there is something missing.

There are very large Edgar Wright shaped holes in the film. Parts of the original screenplay which you feel were intended for Edgar to perform some of his more entertaining director pirouettes. Going into the kitchen to fetch a number of utensils and turn on the gas feels emptier when you think how he did that kind of thing in Hot Fuzz. One feels that a children’s party under his watch would have, well, more children. Doing unspeakable things. And the scene when Scott Lang is picked up from jail by a cohort and is driven home seems to be a reference from the video asking why people don’t use direction in comedy films to be funny.

Because, yes, much of the comedy in this film, is not visual. There are exceptions, the cut shot to Baskins & Robbins, the repeated motif of someone telling a story of what other people said, as we see those other people lipsynching to the narrator’s voice, even if much has changed in the telling, and then certain aspects of the final scenes that seen cribbed directly from The Lego Movie. And good, they were great there and they are great here.

But for much of Ant-Man, it is filmed straight, people say generally funny things and are sometimes awkward about it. Some way say that may make it a better fit to tell what are basically two stories about fathers and daughters, but I don’t think anyone felt the emotional family relationships in previous Wright films were undersold because of the visual panache. For some, however, this film may be a little easier to swallow. Damn them.

And amidst the big time actors of Michael Douglas and Paul Rudd, familiar faces of Evangeline Lilly and Corey Stoll, all being rather wonderful, I would like to give a special shout out to Michael Pena, who steals the show every time he is on screen as an art-loving motormouth henchman. In many ays, Ant-Man is his film and really hope he capitalises on it.

So that’s what I’m left with. A really fun, action packed film, that’s stands up with the Marvel troop and adds to its eclectic line. I’d put it below Iron Man, Guardians and Avengers but above Winter Soldier. Which I know will just start a whole lot of arguments. And whatever criticisms I have, I have plenty of compliments to match them.

Go see.

This is not a review of Ant-Man. You can find that right here. But first, for the most anal of you out there, and I count myself as one, here are the cameos, the references and, yes, both credit sequences for Ant-Man, that I was able to jot down while watching it earlier this week. Some of you like to know them in advance so they can both anticipate and look out for them. If that’s not you, you can read the full reduced-spoiler review here.

Hank Pym used to work for SHIELD before setting up on his own as Pym Industries. We see the older Howard Stark played by John Slattery and rather-better-aged Peggy Carter in a scene set in 1989. Michael Douglas’ young looks works well too.

Pym is not a fan of Tony Stark, and the idea of Stark getting his hands on his technology scares him. That’s why, as Scott Lang’s request, “I think our first move should be to call the Avengers”, he declines saying that they “are too busy dropping cities out of skies.” Oops.

Scott Lang stays in the Milgrom Hotel, named after comics artist Al Milgrom.

His crime is not too dissimilar to that of Richard Pryor‘s character in Superman III. Indeed, it seems a deliberate similarity.

One of the ne’er-do-wells in the film has a Ten Mandarin Ring neck tattoo.

We see old footage scenes of Hank Pym Ant Man in action against soldiers. “Silly I know, propaganda, Tales To Astonish!” as Darren Cross says. That was the title of the comic Ant-Man first appeared in in the sixties.

The Yellowjacket suit is bases on Ant Man’s recurring second identity in the comics.

The Falcon isn’t just here in a cameo. We visit the new Avengers base as seen at the end of Avengers: Age Of Ultron, and Sam Wilson is at home. Cue one of the major fight scenes of the movie. Though, as Falcon says to a HW “It’s really important to be that the Captain doesn’t find out about this.

We flashback to a time when Ant Man fought alongside The Wasp and see them both in action together.

We are told (and see) the Quantum Realm if you shift to subatomic size. Sadly there appears to be no Microverse here. Or, rather, not yet. Maybe if they work things out with Fox Studios.

The schematic and the plans totally look like the Death Star.

Hydra are here.

Stan Lee makes a cameo as a bartender, lipsynching to the narrator’s version of events and what he is meant to have said. Basically, Stan ends up sounding gangsta.

There is a mention of another superhero. “We have a guy who can jump, who can swing, who can crawl up walls.” Just that line, but yes, that’s Spider-Man.

Credits see Ant-Man created by Stan Lee, Larry Lieber and Jack Kirby.

The mid-credit scene, has Captain America, The Falcon and I think a dishevelled, though floppy haired Winter Soldier who is in some kind of fix, that whatever it is, would have been easier to deal with the previous day. Because now they can’t ask Tony Stark for help. Will they be forced to reconsider their position with Tony? “Maybe not, I know a guy” says Falcon.

Clearly Cap didn’t find out…

We are told that Ant Man will return.

More credits make a lot of name checks, everyone from John Byrne to Robert Kirkman.

The final credit scene sees Hank Pym revealing the next version of the Wasp suit that he had been working with Janet Van Dyne on, for Hope Pym to wear. Looks like we have our second Wasp…