Iron Man
Directed by Jon Favreau, 2008
When I read Glenn Kenny's line about Iron Man being, essentially, the best Marvel superhero movie to date, I have to admit: it pissed me off. Or, at least, Kenny pissed all over the Spider-Man fanboy inside me. But movie critics are all standing in line to carry Iron Man's jock, so what do I know?
It's true that, for a contemporary Hollywood summer blockbuster, Iron Man
is an exceptionally well-made film in some important ways--chiefly in
that it has, at the center of things, plenty of room for some actual
performances from some actual actors. Robert Downey Jr. is very good as
Tony Stark, the military-industrialist who finds his heart of gold; a
startlingly bald-and-bearded Jeff Bridges is flat-out excellent as your
villainous uncle, and Gwyneth Paltrow--well, Paltrow does what she can
in her pretty/gawky second-banana role, which is fill skirts and look
wistful. (Third-banana Terrence Howard hangs out in the margins,
apparently just holding onto the promises that he'll have more to do in
the inevitable sequel.)
And Iron Man opens at a pretty good clip, with a sequence set in a desert somewhere in the Middle East (Afghanistan, presumably) where Tony Stark, having just hosted a demonstration of a ridiculous new multifariously explosive missile, is humbled by the realization that the terrorists who blow up his military convoy and take him hostage are armed with weapons that have his name printed on the side. To date, Stark has been a billionaire playboy--a cross between Richard Branson and Howard Hughes--and Iron Man is actually more fun when it's chronicling his callow antics (throwing dice when he should be giving a speech, bedding a Vanity Fair reporter, or lounging in the miniature strip club built into his private jet) than it is when Stark swears off the weapons industry and goes supersonic in his self-made superhuman-power suit. Yes, there's a charming clunkiness to the first iteration of this behemoth, a kludgy rock-em-sock-em-robot kind of affair that Stark pieces together when his not-too-attentive captors put him to work in a makeshift weapons factory. But after Stark returns home and, in an undeniably amusing series of trial-and-error iterations, homebrews his sleek suit of armor in the basement of his picturesque Malibu home, he becomes an army of one--and because there's precious little his sidekicks need do to help him out, the film's impressive human dimension becomes superfluous as the action grinds on.
Stark returns to the desert, where he drops a few terrorists and blows up a tank in a neat action scene that's apparently meant to constitute a satisfying revenge scenario, but instead only draws attention to the intractable real-world problems the U.S. faces over there, for all its military might. And then he comes back home to L.A., where Obadiah Stane (Bridges), once his right-hand man but now a murderous turncoat, has built his own super-suit. And so the climax of Iron Man resorts to that grand old cliché: two men beating the hell out of each other. Of course, Hollywood movies with blockbuster aspirations tend to rely on derivative, unimaginative action. But a big exception, I'd argue, is the Spider-Man movies, or at least the first two, which boast skillfully mounted and expertly edited set pieces that contrast nicely with the cornpone dialogue, romantic melodrama, and broad clichés found in Spidey territory.
And that's the thing--the distance between the Spider-Man movies and Iron Man is a function of directorial chops. On the evidence presented in The Evil Dead, his first feature film, Raimi may well have popped out of his mother's belly covered in Karo syrup and red food coloring, clutching a Bolex in one hand and framing shots through his little pink eyelids. Even his shitty movies are visual dynamite, with action shot from all the right angles and lithely edited for maximum impact. Favreau, on the other hand, is what's called "an actor's director" rather than any kind of stylist. He lavishes attention on Tony Stark's frame of mind, enough so that you can sense the transformation that takes place, from his early narcissism to the grim determination of the scenes in which he builds his cave-busting giant and back to the giddy self-regard of his climactic declaration, "I am Iron Man." (The screenwriters don't seem to be sure, exactly, what kind of character arc they're going for, but in the hands of Favreau and Downey, at least it's vivid.) And the non-romance between Stark and personal assistant Pepper Potts pays off in a couple of late-movie scenes that underscores the occasional embarrassment and confusion of awkward courtships without going for the obvious romantic payoff. (Again, there will always be sequels.)
But when it comes time to mount the big set pieces, and especially whenever Downey disappears into that super suit, Iron Man turns so generic it feels almost like the film has cut to a commercial break. I don't require Jurassic Park-level action contraptions in every big-budget cartoon that comes to theaters, but I do demand a bit of showmanship. The smallish Thursday-night crowd I saw the movie with laughed a lot, but seemed to become electrified only once, when Iron Man, returning to the Middle Eastern desert, thunked from cruising altitude to the ground in a fierce, tightly wound crouch that gave the impression serious ass was on the verge of being kicked. That's a standout shot in a mass of perfunctory action that, ironically, sucks the energy out of the movie. Watching the scenes of Iron Man flying through the stratosphere made me wax nostalgic not just for the acrobatic post-adolescent "Yahoo!" of those vertiginous scenes of web-slinging through gleaming Manhattan canyons in the Spider-Man movies, but also, briefly, for Superman Returns--unwieldy as that movie was, its scenes of flight had a sense of wonder and majesty that humanized the hero, rather than just his earthbound alter-ego. Downey is cool beans, sure. But Iron Man himself, set against a bland score by Ramin Djawadi that seems divided between cheese-metal guitar pop and Hans-Zimmer-lite orchestrations, is just another piece of chilly military hardware. Too often, it's hard to remember why we're supposed to be rooting for him, anyway. B
Posted by on May 2, 2024 6:38 PM
And Iron Man opens at a pretty good clip, with a sequence set in a desert somewhere in the Middle East (Afghanistan, presumably) where Tony Stark, having just hosted a demonstration of a ridiculous new multifariously explosive missile, is humbled by the realization that the terrorists who blow up his military convoy and take him hostage are armed with weapons that have his name printed on the side. To date, Stark has been a billionaire playboy--a cross between Richard Branson and Howard Hughes--and Iron Man is actually more fun when it's chronicling his callow antics (throwing dice when he should be giving a speech, bedding a Vanity Fair reporter, or lounging in the miniature strip club built into his private jet) than it is when Stark swears off the weapons industry and goes supersonic in his self-made superhuman-power suit. Yes, there's a charming clunkiness to the first iteration of this behemoth, a kludgy rock-em-sock-em-robot kind of affair that Stark pieces together when his not-too-attentive captors put him to work in a makeshift weapons factory. But after Stark returns home and, in an undeniably amusing series of trial-and-error iterations, homebrews his sleek suit of armor in the basement of his picturesque Malibu home, he becomes an army of one--and because there's precious little his sidekicks need do to help him out, the film's impressive human dimension becomes superfluous as the action grinds on.
Stark returns to the desert, where he drops a few terrorists and blows up a tank in a neat action scene that's apparently meant to constitute a satisfying revenge scenario, but instead only draws attention to the intractable real-world problems the U.S. faces over there, for all its military might. And then he comes back home to L.A., where Obadiah Stane (Bridges), once his right-hand man but now a murderous turncoat, has built his own super-suit. And so the climax of Iron Man resorts to that grand old cliché: two men beating the hell out of each other. Of course, Hollywood movies with blockbuster aspirations tend to rely on derivative, unimaginative action. But a big exception, I'd argue, is the Spider-Man movies, or at least the first two, which boast skillfully mounted and expertly edited set pieces that contrast nicely with the cornpone dialogue, romantic melodrama, and broad clichés found in Spidey territory.
And that's the thing--the distance between the Spider-Man movies and Iron Man is a function of directorial chops. On the evidence presented in The Evil Dead, his first feature film, Raimi may well have popped out of his mother's belly covered in Karo syrup and red food coloring, clutching a Bolex in one hand and framing shots through his little pink eyelids. Even his shitty movies are visual dynamite, with action shot from all the right angles and lithely edited for maximum impact. Favreau, on the other hand, is what's called "an actor's director" rather than any kind of stylist. He lavishes attention on Tony Stark's frame of mind, enough so that you can sense the transformation that takes place, from his early narcissism to the grim determination of the scenes in which he builds his cave-busting giant and back to the giddy self-regard of his climactic declaration, "I am Iron Man." (The screenwriters don't seem to be sure, exactly, what kind of character arc they're going for, but in the hands of Favreau and Downey, at least it's vivid.) And the non-romance between Stark and personal assistant Pepper Potts pays off in a couple of late-movie scenes that underscores the occasional embarrassment and confusion of awkward courtships without going for the obvious romantic payoff. (Again, there will always be sequels.)
But when it comes time to mount the big set pieces, and especially whenever Downey disappears into that super suit, Iron Man turns so generic it feels almost like the film has cut to a commercial break. I don't require Jurassic Park-level action contraptions in every big-budget cartoon that comes to theaters, but I do demand a bit of showmanship. The smallish Thursday-night crowd I saw the movie with laughed a lot, but seemed to become electrified only once, when Iron Man, returning to the Middle Eastern desert, thunked from cruising altitude to the ground in a fierce, tightly wound crouch that gave the impression serious ass was on the verge of being kicked. That's a standout shot in a mass of perfunctory action that, ironically, sucks the energy out of the movie. Watching the scenes of Iron Man flying through the stratosphere made me wax nostalgic not just for the acrobatic post-adolescent "Yahoo!" of those vertiginous scenes of web-slinging through gleaming Manhattan canyons in the Spider-Man movies, but also, briefly, for Superman Returns--unwieldy as that movie was, its scenes of flight had a sense of wonder and majesty that humanized the hero, rather than just his earthbound alter-ego. Downey is cool beans, sure. But Iron Man himself, set against a bland score by Ramin Djawadi that seems divided between cheese-metal guitar pop and Hans-Zimmer-lite orchestrations, is just another piece of chilly military hardware. Too often, it's hard to remember why we're supposed to be rooting for him, anyway. B
Posted by on May 2, 2024 6:38 PM
