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iron man
Iron Man is one of the best comic book movies ever made. I could stop there, but there’s too much to talk about. This is the first superhero movie since Superman Returns that I’ve had an instant urge to see again, as fast as possible — and nostalgia played a giant role in that urge for Superman. I’ve never read the Iron Man comic books. I’d never heard of Tony Stark. I didn’t know anything about the character. And the movie didn’t aim over my head — with Iron Man, the filmmakers have made a superhero movie just for people like me.
Here’s the quick summary to get us rolling: Tony Stark (Robert Downey, Jr.) is the millionaire — possibly billionaire — playboy who runs Stark Industries, a weapons manufacturer that’s at the bleeding edge of technological innovation. In between glasses of scotch, Tony’s pitching the Jericho missile, Stark’s latest toy, to American military institutions. (The Jericho is a missile that, when in sight of its target, launches a fleet of smaller missiles that, ostensibly, confuse anti-missle batteries and blow the shit out of anything within a mile radius of the target. I’m making up that mile-radius detail, but when you see this happen, you have to assume that’s what we’re talking about here.) When he’s not selling missiles, Tony Stark likes to dick around in his mansion’s basement workshop, lovingly restoring vintage sports cars. His closest friends are his personal assistant, Pepper Potts (Gwyneth Paltrow), who regards him with deep affection and total understanding — Potts has a thing for Stark despite his fast-and-loose womanizing ways — and his buddy Rhodes, a military guy who is really boring and uninterestingly portrayed by Terrence Howard. Oh, and there’s Obadiah Stane (Jeff Bridges), a very old friend of Stark’s father and the man who runs Stark Industries while Tony plays.
After a demonstration of the Jericho, Tony and his military escorts fall into an ambush. Tony Stark is captured, but not before he is seriously wounded by shrapnel. His captors perform surgery and implant an electromagnet in Tony’s chest; the magnet is constantly warring with the shrapnel that threatens to chug its way through Tony’s veins, right to his heart. Tony is ordered to build a Jericho missile for his captors. Instead, he builds himself an exit: a welded-together metal exoskeleton — well, less of an exoskeleton than armor that looks like a portable dumpster. He escapes, and upon returning to his real life, has a change of heart: he will dismantle the weapons portion of Stark Industries’ business, and try to bring a little goodness back to the world. Obadiah Stane disagrees, conflict is born, and Stark gets to work refining his clunky iron costume. Iron Man wallows in some of the requisite superhero movie conventions — the in-the-loop assistant who serves the hero’s every need; the bitter, cliche-spouting supervillain; the origin tale; et cetera — but it addresses each of these as if they were not conventions at all. Here’s the best part about this: from minute one, Iron Man is all about that sense of self-discovery that every origin movie features briefly (think about Peter Parker leaping across the buildings in Spider-Man, or little Clark lifting the truck off of his foster father in Superman) — but in Iron Man, that sense of discovery never ends. Tony Stark’s just your average guy building jetpacks and titanium joints in his basement; he’s learning as he goes, from the moment he hammers his glowing steel helmet to the final battle. There’s no hide-and-seek with the costume, or even the action — you get to watch Stark test-drive his creation for nearly the entire movie, with often hilarious results. That same thrill you got from watching Christian Bale spray paint and cobble together his Batman suit in Batman Begins is present here — but it’s so much more elemental and crafty. Downey communicates such pure joy at his achievements that you honestly feel like cheering when he succeeds.
Aside from a solid script, the movie benefits from intuitive casting. Increasingly, superhero movies are becoming populated with high-caliber actors, not just pretty faces or well-proportioned bodies. The Dark Knight is stacked with them — you buy into the Batman story even more when you see Christian Bale in the role, instead of Val Kilmer or George Clooney. When you cast actors for more than their chins, the results are almost always undeniably good. Iron Man stars maybe the most unlikely actor in the title role; Robert Downey, Jr., isn’t the sort of man you envision battling terrorists and supervillains. He’s the guy you imagine tinkling the piano, seducing the leading lady, then overdosing and nearly dying before the second act. Perhaps the real beauty of his casting is the believability it lends to Tony Stark’s wild side — every adult in a theatre seat knows of Downey’s struggles with substance abuse and his run-ins with law and celebrity gossip rags, and all of that translates to Tony Stark via Downey’s simple casting. And that’s just the lead. The rest of the leads have all been nominated for the Academy Award (it’s a shame that between Downey, Paltrow, Howard and Bridges the only one who has ever won is Paltrow). And while it might be disconcerting to see Oscar nominees stomping around in mechanized body armor, as soon as you get over that sensation, you buy into their performances completely. The workshop robots that interact with Downey throughout the movie probably deserve nominations as well.
Jon Favreau isn’t the first person you’d think of if you were hiring a director for your hundreds-of-millions-of-dollars superhero project. He probably isn’t even the tenth or twentieth. But he’s done something here that’s pretty remarkable — unlike a number of other directors who use superhero movies to work out their own geek issues (Tim Burton nearly tanked the Superman series with his cape-less, mopey Superman, for example), Favreau has a crafty understanding of what will make an audience laugh and cheer and groan, and he plays this movie like an electric violin. Improbably, the fat kid from Rudy has made one of the greatest superhero movies of all-time. In stark (heh, heh) contrast, I finally got around to watching Spider-Man 3 this weekend. I’d review it, but I don’t think repeating the same three words — what the fuck? — over and over would really constitute a proper movie review.
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May 4th, 2008 at 1:30 pm
Who would have expected Jon Favreau to direct such a hot super hero movie???
You’re totally rock solid on how the success of this origin story is it’s focus on self-discovery as opposed to the other things that can bog a origin story down.
nice post for sure!
May 4th, 2008 at 3:08 pm
I’m still reeling from the awesomeness that was this movie. Not to mention, I just can’t get enough of The Dude screaming at someone for not getting their shit done on time.
April 17th, 2010 at 4:07 pm
You’re totally rock solid on how the success of this origin story is it’s focus on self-discovery as opposed to the other things that can bog a origin story down.