The hardest part of watching Marvel’s "Ant-Man" is thinking about the "Ant-Man" movie you’re not watching.

That was always doomed to be the case ever since beloved "Scott Pilgrim vs. the World" director Edgar Wright parted with the project last May due to Hollywood’s oft-cited creative differences, sending the film’s fate spiraling into doubt. As the search for a replacement raged on, even loyal Marvel fanboys were left wondering if the studio was better off simply quitting on the property.

There’s no guarantee that Wright’s version would’ve been as good as fans want to imagine – especially if he and the studio were struggling to see eye to eye – but it certainly would’ve been distinctive considering the director’s kinetic, waste-no-frame style and machine gun approach to jokes.

Once you finally make peace with that fact and let that ship sail, however, the "Ant-Man" movie we ended up actually getting is actually still pretty good in its own right, delivering a brisk-minded micro-sized caper into the Marvel Cinematic Universe without the burden of the MCU – or its tortured production history – weighing on its tiny pest-sized shoulders. It’s a small, silly superhero given a satisfyingly small, silly treatment.

After finally getting out of prison for robbing his old fraudulent company Robin Hood style, Scott Lang (the ageless Paul Rudd) is looking for a fresh start. Unfortunately, the world isn’t too kind to ex-cons. His ex-wife (Judy Greer, continuing her summer of perpetual underutilization) and her new cop fiancé (Bobby Cannavale) aren’t particularly keen on Scott visiting his sweet daughter until he gets on his feet – and starts paying child support – but he can’t even hold onto a lowly job at Baskin-Robbins, getting fired by Neil Hamburger himself Gregg Turkington.

In desperation, he turns back to his best skill – burgling – joining his old buddies (including the rapper T.I., David Dastmalchian and the film’s giddy MVP Michael Pena) on a job.

The score ends up being a bust, cleverly cracking into a safe just to find a weird suit. Great things, however, come up in stolen packages, as the seemingly useless booty ends up being the Ant-Man suit, a costume capable of shrinking its user down to insect proportions. It turns out Scott’s been chosen by the suit’s genius former S.H.I.E.L.D. inventor Dr. Hank Pym (Michael Douglas) to help stop Pym’s crazed protégé Darren Cross (Corey Stoll), who’s just cracked the science behind the suit and wants to sell its dangerous power to the highest bidder.

With the reluctant help of Pym’s distant daughter Hope (Evangeline Lilly, "Lost") Scott must learn how to control his suit’s powers – as well as his specialized "Pikmin"-like ant buddies – steal Cross’ prototype and save the world, plus a few families in the process. Cue the zany shrinking hijinks and Thomas the Train-set action sequences.

It’s hard to exactly tell where the Edgar Wright – who still maintains a screenplay and executive producer credit on the film – contributions begin and end in "Ant-Man," but his fingerprints are still felt all over the film. From the zippy and whip-sharp brand of humor – few use editing as precisely for comedy as Wright – to its lovingly goofball sense of genre, his movie still feels like it’s bursting at the seams in "Ant-Man."

It’s distractingly easy to find your mind wondering what certain scenes would be like with his signature visual energy, what regularly shot conversations would have more pop and what little gags would play more crisply.

The "what ifs" are sadly inevitable, but thankfully, director Peyton Reed ("Bring It On," "The Break-Up") does a more than capable job filling in. Reed may not have the same distinctive pop, but he has a strong feel for the humor and the lighter genre tone, keeping things fun, brisk and playful.

And even though he’s not Wright, Reed still brings a good amount of visual wit and spark to the film. The Ant-Man shrinkings, for instance, have a charmingly comic book-esque look with outlines decreasing in size, while the movie’s best gag – a duo of stories narrated by the easily distracted Pena – happily, not to mention hilariously, play like Wright-lite, energetically whip-editing around from character to character. There’s even a part of the big climactic fight – an inter-dimensional visit that might as well have Matthew McConaughey’s character from "Interstellar" floating around – that’s visually about the trippiest thing Marvel’s allowed itself to do thus far. 

Reed’s work helps "Ant-Man" feel like a nice oddity from the Marvel universe, a film that feels pleasantly unweighed by the studio’s universe-building machinery. It is the light refreshing popsicle to the triple fudge caramel butterscotch brownie banana split that was "Avengers: Age of Ultron."

Instead of having to set things up or keep up dramatically, Reed and the crew of writers make "Ant-Man" the pesky goofball of the MCU. After all, this is freaking Ant-Man, a hero who telepathetically talks to bugs and gets really, really tiny. And it amusingly relishes its tiny – and really comparatively human-sized – place in a hero-centric world, cracking jokes about existing with the Avengers and even having an action sequence in which our miniscule hero politely pesters an Avenger.

Even the stakes are smaller – there’s no earth-sucking portals or land meteors flying to our doom – but they still feel significant, partly because they’re more down to earth than saving the Earth (or at least as down to earth a battle with a laser-shooting super-suited psychopath can get).

With that freedom comes a lot of just plain fun. The size-shifting action is exciting and entertainingly playful – not to mention unafraid to inject plenty of humor in between punches. The climactic battle, for instance, has so many objects giddily blowing up into ungodly sizes and heroes shrinking into pedestrian settings that it plays more like an ’80s/’90s action adventure than today’s often more serious-minded blockbuster fare. Even just the sequences of Scott learning his suit and plotting a heist, which really is most of the movie if we’re being honest, have a unique and inventive angle on action.

As our tiny titular titan, Rudd fits rather nicely into the silly-tinted superhero movie. He’s sympathetically noble and amicable, but the real treat is his usual sly and relaxed everyman delivery. He’s a kind of kooky curveball of a performer to bring into the Marvel universe – there’s just a hint of wackiness under his seemingly unassuming persona – but for both the heroics and the humor, it works really well.

Douglas and Lilly are good as well, but the real scene-stealer is the unrelentingly chipper Pena, who smiles and fast-talks his way into some of the movie’s biggest laughs.

Even as the almost mischievous rascal of the Marvel fleet, "Ant-Man" still has some of the studio’s now token and trite story elements. The redemptive origin story arc is not particularly new, and while Stoll acts the slick smarmy hell out of Darren Cross, he’s still just another evil dude (for an all-powerful comic book corporation owned by an even more all-powerful entertainment corporation, Marvel movies are oddly suspicious with all-powerful corporations). In general, "Ant-Man" plays better when it feels like it’s going off the usual Marvel script. 

Marvel’s frustratingly dismissive attitude toward its female characters makes an appearance as well with Hope. She’s presented as infinitely more capable and knowledgeable than Scott; in fact, she serves as his harrumphing teacher for much of his training. Yes, her sidelining is a part of her and her father’s sweet emotional arc – and a mid-credit scene gives her a nice spotlight – but a lot of it feels like the screenplay is jumping through hoops to make Scott the hero despite the perfectly good hero standing just off to the side.

It results in Ant-Man feeling oddly unnecessary in the Ant-Man movie. There’s also an out of nowhere romantic angle tossed on at the end that’s best left paying no mind to; after all, the past two hours sure didn’t.

Even so, those are small issues in an otherwise largely entertaining blockbuster. And yes, you can lament the movie that doesn’t exist, but you're better off enjoying the jaunty, bright superhero movie you actually wound up with in the process.