I’m afraid that I must respectfully but vehemently disagree with my buddy Sue in her review of Iron Man, which I saw yesterday. (Although I did like her Entertainment Weekly-inspired review title.) But then again, I’m probably one of the eternal “14-year-old boys who are impressed with girls, guns and gadgetry” that she mentions. Yes, Robert Downey Jr does a good job of sending up his own image, but the role is so much more than that. Though I’ve been a fan of the Iron Man comics off and on over the years (it really depends on who the creative team is), I’ve never been that much enamored of the Tony Stark character. Even after he gained a conscience, he still seemed like something of a rigid prick who always felt like he was right. And I always hated that goatee. But Downey made me actually like and feel for the guy - much like his role is Kiss Kiss Bang Bang, one of the most underrated movies of all time. All the performances were excellent, and Jeff Bridges actually didn’t chew the scenery as much as I thought he would. Gwyneth Paltrow and Terrence Howard also give great performances, as you’d expect from these Oscar-level actors, and you really believe that their characters love and respect their friend Stark.
About that goatee - I wondered before the movie came out if you could just slap that on to any actor and have him look like Tony Stark. Now I think not. Downey just had that overall look down so well that I really believed he had lept off the comic page.
I do have to admit the big action scene at the end was lacking and made me bored. Seeing two armored guys duke it out is just not that interesting, no matter how you dress it up or how big you make one of them. Like all superhero movie origin stories, I wish there were more scenes of the hero doing heroic things not as directly related to the main plot (y’know, saving the cat in the tree like in the original Superman, or stopping a bank robbery, or stuff like that). Sue’s right - there is a lot of “suit building” in this movie, a lot of which seems implausible (that’s some power supply!), but that was necessary to the character and the conventions of the origin story. I’m sure the sequel will be more interesting, especially if they adapt “Demon in a Bottle” or something like that.
And speaking of the sequel, Sue seems to think that the scene at the end of the credits (do stay for the whole thing!) is setting up the sequel. The impression I got was that it was more setting up the intertwined universe that Marvel Studios is creating with their movies. I believe this will become more obvious once the new Edward Norton Hulk movie is released next month. And hey, how can anyone object to a cool Samuel L. Jackson cameo, especially one without snakes?
There’s other stuff in the movie that’s setting up a potential sequel, but much of that will be obvious only to fanboys (”ten rings”, Rhodey eying that spare suit, etc).
If I were using the old nod-o-meter, this one would’ve rated a 0 (or less). I swear I didn’t even start to nod off during the entire film - which is really, really rare for me these days. Yeah, I liked it.
Latre.
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4 responses so far ↓
1 Sue // May 5, 2008 at 10:24 am
I’m pretty ignorant of the whole Marvel-verse, and I’d never even heard of the comic book Iron Man before this movie, so that shows where I’m coming from! For the record, though, I LOVED “Spider-Man 2″ and also thought the X-Men movies were great. Anyway, I figured you would like this movie, and I’m glad you enjoyed it!
2 Paula // May 5, 2008 at 3:06 pm
I loved IRON MAN, too!
3 yellojkt // May 5, 2008 at 5:13 pm
Great review. I don’t know much of the Iron Man mythology, but I’m glad the makers of the movie did. I’ll catch it on DVD.
4 2fs // May 18, 2008 at 9:18 pm
I (a)finally/(b)already saw the movie (I rarely get to movies in theaters, but Rose wanted to see this one (!). I’m more with Flasshe than Sue - I think the suit-building was incidental in a sense to what was going on while the suit-building was going on - but yeah, the big action sequence/fight was …eh, more kinetic cuts, explosions, and large objects being tossed about. That said, I actually thought the movie at least made an effort to be about character in addition to “wow! cool gadget!”
I will say, though, that if movies can pay someone whose job it is to ensure continuity, even down to things hardly anyone’s going to notice like omigod in that shot his thumb was on the glass and in the next it’s not! (as if people don’t move their hands), you’d think they could hire plausibility editors to take care of things that, even within a slightly cartoony universe, just don’t make sense. Like say, the likelihood that superwealthy gadget dude would apparently have no security at his house…or that no one would notice that the first suit’s being built (I think I phrased that unspoilerly) rather than what it pretends to be.
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