“Broke My Head”: Ant-Man’s Ridiculous Heist Scene Criticized By Professional Safecracker

Ant-Man‘s heist scene is not quite the best, according to a professional safecracker. Paul Rudd debuted in the Marvel Cinematic Universe as Scott Lang in 2015’s Ant-Man, with the movie revealing that Scott was a thief before he became one of the MCU’s most beloved heroes. By the time Ant-Man‘s post-credits scene teased Captain America: Civil War, Scott had already fully become a hero; however, Ant-Man showed that Scott’s criminal ties were very much alive at the start of the film, with Rudd’s character trying to rob Hank Pym’s house.

Insider showed safe technician Charlie Santore Ant-Man‘s heist scene, letting the expert give his review of 2015’s Ant-Man.

Santore was not very impressed with Scott Lang’s heist sequence in the MCU movie, with the real-life safecracker pointing out several flaws in Ant-Man‘s depiction of how Scott got into Hank Pym’s vault. According to the specialist, the movie’s errors include Scott taking a fingerprint off a door with the use of tape and the character freezing the vault door to crack it apart. As Ant-Man used a real safecracking tool — the StrongArm MiniRig — Santore rated the scene a 3/10. Check out the full quote below:

“He’s taken the fingerprint off the door with tape. It could have been the cleaning lady’s print that he pulled off of there. This actually broke my head a little bit. If you pull the print off with tape, and you turn it over and put a ring on it, and put Loctite in it aren’t you actually making it a cast of the invert of the fingerprint?

Carbondale’s a made-up name, but the vault door itself, I looked through hundreds and hundreds of photos of vault doors, and I’m pretty certain that the art directors based this off a very early Diebold vault door. This is actually a real tool. This is a StrongArm MiniRig that’s used for putting pressure when one’s drilling. So that aspect of it is definitely accurate. We’ll go do a quick job that winds up being something where you don’t have your full tool kit with you. So there’s lots of times when we’ve been running around trying to bend wires and make tools and sort of have to come up with something that we didn’t have with us.

Supposedly he’s freezing it, and it’s going to expand and crack this door apart. What they showed us was the bolt work inside of the safe and the door pan. There’s a big door pan. If he poured a gallon of water in there, it would spill out the bottom of the door pan, basically. If by chance he froze it and the ice expanded, I mean, obviously water can expand. Glaciers expand over time. The thing about a vault door is, in this case, there’s a thin back panel that’s like sheet metal essentially on the back of the door. So the idea that that’s going to expand is pure fantasy. It would blow the back of the panel off before it blew the door off.

I opened up a couple of safes that were at a Blockbuster Video a while and there was Astroglide, condoms, and some dirty photos. So I don’t know if a manager was having a fling with somebody, but that was pretty unexpected. On the more valuable side of things, we once opened a safe in an affluent part of Beverly Hills that people had recently moved into a home. The former owner was gone. There were Bulgari necklaces, Cartier necklaces, Krugerrands, GIA certificates. I mean, I can only imagine that it must have been a mid-to-high-six-figure lick. But I think that people get traumatized when there’s that much left because they’re not expecting to have a moral conflict, sort of. You know, ‘It’s technically mine, but this obviously meant a great deal to whoever it was that was living here before.’

It’s nonsense, but the MiniRig is real. So I’m going to give it a 3 [Rating out of 10].”

Is Scott Lang Actually A Good Thief?

Scott Lang would not be a good thief in real life, as per Santore’s review of Ant-Man‘s heist sequence. However, the character was a very good thief in the MCU. Scott found success in many of his heists, including one at the Avengers Compound in Ant-Man. While the character was a convicted thief before Pym selected him to don his Ant-Man suit and become the new bearer of the Ant-Man mantle, that doesn’t mean that Scott only failed in his criminal life.

Scott has been shown to be a smart character, making him a master thief, as Rudd’s hero has a great mixture of athletic abilities, as well as knowledge of chemistry and hacking, which help him pull off heists. However, Scott got caught when trying to rob Hank Pym’s home, though that ultimately led to him becoming a reformed hero. While Scott has failed as a thief a few times in the MCU, that does not mean that can’t be successful if there are high stakes involved.

That is why Kang the Conqueror made Scott steal his Multiversal Engine Core back in Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania, knowing that the hero would deliver if his daughter’s life was at risk. Scott was successful, showing that he can be a good thief when needed. Thankfully, his life has taken a turn away from his criminal past, with Scott now being a beloved Avenger — even being chosen to write a book about the events of Avengers: Endgame — and founding X-Con Security Consultants, which sees Scott move away from his past as a thief to now spearhead a security company, showing his growth since the first Ant-Man.