I'm usually not that excited about special effects type films but with Robert Downey Jr. in the lead I am admittedly excited about this. Early reviews seem largely strong as well.
Posts: 12252 | Location: Phoenix, AZ | Registered: February 02, 2003
A positive review from Todd McCarthy in VARIETY...
Finally, someone's found a sure-fire way to make money with a modern Middle East war movie: Just send a Marvel superhero into the fray to kick some insurgent butt. The powerhouse comicbook-inspired actioner "Iron Man" isn't principally about this fantasy, but it won't hurt at least American audiences' enjoyment of this expansively entertaining special effects extravaganza. Having an actor as supercharged as Robert Downey Jr. at the center of such a tech-oriented enterprise reps a huge plus, and Paramount should reap big B.O. rewards by getting out ahead of the summer tentpole pack with such a classy refitting of an overworked format. It's refreshing, for a start, that the character suddenly endowed with superpowers isn't a dweeby teen, but rather a pushing-middle-age genius who is himself entirely responsible for the advanced means he acquires to combat his adversaries; even more than the latest incarnation of Batman, he's a self-made superman. And while we've seen plenty of masks and gravity-resistant heroes before, the outfit sported by the main man here, which looks as though it was made by a top ski boot manufacturer, is striking and capable of great things.
Half-hour setup neatly dovetails essential character background with the flawed hero's extreme imperilment. Imperious, sarcastic and arrogant, Tony Stark (Downey) creates the world's most sophisticated weapons for the U.S. Army. A boozer and brash ladies' man, the gazillionaire (originally based to a great extent on Howard Hughes) inherited Stark Industries from his late father and runs the company with his dad's partner Obadiah Stane (Jeff Bridges). Praised as a technological Da Vinci and reviled as "the merchant of death," this is a man who always gets what he wants.
On a demonstration trip to Afghanistan, however, Tony is ambushed and kidnapped by swarthy insurgent types who take him to a cave, connect him to a bomb and command him to make them his latest and greatest weapon. Despite being closely watched, the devious dude surreptitiously creates a sort of high-tech armor suit that turns him into "a destructive Robbie the Robot" and enables him to thwart his captors and fly off into the desert, where he promptly crashes before being rescued by Yanks.
Tony arrives back home a changed man. Revealing that during captivity he "realized I have more to offer the world than making things that blow up," Tony announces his exit from the arms business, which sends his huge firm's stock plummeting and pits the ruthless Obadiah against him.
Trying to settle on what to do with his life, Tony begins fashioning a more sophisticated version of his jerry-rigged suit, and one of the film's most delightful scenes has him making a trial run in his warehouse; seamless visual effects allow an encased Tony to hover and rocket around via boot and glove jets. In a memorable maiden voyage, he zooms out of his Malibu h.q. and shoots above Santa Monica on his way to testing the outer atmospheric limits of his marvelous invention.
At the same time, the bad boys back in Afghanistan are patching together the broken remains of Tony's original improvised suit and wreaking havoc on the local populace with a cache of stolen Stark weapons. It's easy to see where this is headed, and it isn't long before Tony is high-flying it back for a little precision target practice at the expense of the nasties. (Only the snide will wonder why he doesn't stop off in Iraq on the way home to put things in order there.)
Foreign kidnap-and-revenge format actually recycles the initial "Iron Man" storyline from the April 1963 Marvel comic, in which the heavies were Vietcong. Current villains do not espouse any particular religion or ideology, although their leader, the bald-headed Raza (Faran Tahir), professes a desire to become the new Genghis Khan.
Tony's self-appointed role as international enforcer doesn't go down well with U.S. officials, including his Pentagon pal Rhodey (Terrence Howard), and another action highlight has supersonic Iron Man in a wild dogfight with a couple of American fighter jets.
With foreign devils out of the way, at least for the moment, the final act's dynamic pits Tony against turncoat Obadiah. Although kids will probably like it, the climactic giant suit vs. giant suit battle, which, with its machines' multitude of moving parts and resultant clanging metal smacks all too much of "Transformers," is the pic's only disappointment.
Talent lineup on both sides of the camera injects familiar conceits with fresh energy and stylistic polish. The work of two screenwriting teams -- Mark Fergus and Hawk Ostby ("Children of Men") and Art Marcum and Matt Holloway -- have been blended effectively to keep the plot moving and provide motor-mouthed Downey with plenty of snappy dialogue. Ever-eclectic director Jon Favreau, who briefly pops up onscreen as a Stark minion, maintains a brisk but not frantic pace, and, in concert with lenser Matthew Libatique, production designer J. Michael Riva and the first-rate visual effects team, has made an unusually elegant looking film for the genre.
Snapping off lines as crisply as Bugs Bunny might bite into a carrot, the sculpture-bearded Downey invigorates the entire proceedings in a way no other actor ever has in this field. Initially conveying Tony's Matt Helm lifestyle as if it's second nature, Downey possesses a one-of-a-kind intensity that perfectly serves the character's second-act drive and obstinacy. His Achilles' heel is his heart, at first threatened by shrapnel and later central to his superpower and his submerged romantic relationship with ever-loyal assistant Pepper Potts, who Gwyneth Paltrow, in an unexpected casting move, endows with smarts and appeal.
Shaven-headed and sporting a bushy beard in a way that makes him rather resemble Bruce Willis, Bridges is an imposing antagonist. Other roles, including Howard's second-billed Air Force officer, are one-dimensional.
All tech credits are tops.
Posts: 12252 | Location: Phoenix, AZ | Registered: February 02, 2003
Iron Man may not make the A-list of Marvel Comics' stable, but he may be the cinema superhero for the rest of us. You gotta love a middle-aged wreck as a superhero. Iron Man may not make the A-list of Marvel Comics' stable -- home to Spider-Man, X-Men and the Hulk -- but he may be the cinema superhero for the rest of us. No spider bite or genetic mutation produces him. Rather he springs from good old American ingenuity, the brainchild of his creator and impersonator, Tony Stark, a character modeled in part on genius-playboy Howard Hughes. Tony wears his character flaws like badges of honor yet Iron Man represents a midlife correction.
"Iron Man," the first self-financed production from Marvel Studios, should catch boxoffice lightning in a bottle, thanks to hiring longtime Marvel Comics reader Jon Favreau as director and the supersmart casting of Robert Downey Jr. as the conflicted protagonist. The betting line about opening weekend grosses really pales in significance to the real question: Will the film imitate its hero's ability to blast into the stratosphere for many weeks? The guess here is a big yes.
The entire film, written by Mark Fergus & Hawk Ostby and Art Marcum & Matt Holloway, is devoted to how Tony Stark, the top U.S. weapons manufacturer and all-around playboy, becomes Iron Man. A kidnapping by insurgents in Afghanistan forces Tony to invent a crude prototype to escape captivity. (His captors are a little too dumb for belief to think he is actually assembling a weapon for them.)
Back in his Malibu home, having witnessed U.S. soldiers slaughtered with his weaponry, he declares himself out of that business for good. While his partner Obadiah Stane (a marvelously malevolent Jeff Bridges) seizes control of the company, Tony perfects his red-and-gold weapons suit with a somewhat ill-defined plan to use it for good. The film neatly borrows from a raft of both real and science-fiction technologies as well as previous sci-fi movies to propel the fast-paced two-hour film. In his home basement (think Bat Cave), Tony can talk to his computers and robotics (think R2-D2) while his suit starts to resemble RoboCop on human growth hormones. The space flights and acrobatics over Los Angeles evoke Spider-Man. Yet the whole package is distinctly its own, a tale originated in the '60s cleverly and logically transposed into today's world.
Downey plays off his own bad-boy image wonderfully. The writers give him great lines to work with and ditto that for his Girl Friday, Gwyneth Paltrow's Pepper Potts, whose own svelte lines cannot be improved on.
Key disappointment is a climatic battle between different Iron Man prototypes, which is both illogical -- how did Tony's nemesis learn how to use the suit? -- and derivative of many other superhero climaxes. Never mind. Marvel has several more sequels to upgrade "Iron Man."
IRON MAN Paramount Pictures Paramount Pictures/Marvel Entertainment Credits: Director: Jon Favreau Writers: Mark Fergus, Hawk Ostby, Art Marcum, Matt Holloway Based on the comic by: Marvel Comics Producers: Avi Arad, Kevin Feige Executive producers: Louis D'Esposito, Peter Billingsley, Stan Lee, David Maisel, Jon Favreau Director of photography: Matthew Libatique Production designer: J. Michael Riva Music: Ramin Djawadi Costume designer: Laura Jean Shannon Editor: Dan Lebental Cast: Tony Stark/Iron Man: Robert Downey Jr. Jim Rhodes: Terrence Howard Pepper Potts: Gwyneth Paltrow Obadiah Stane: Jeff Bridges Yinsen: Shaun Toub Raza: Faran Tahir Running time 126 minutes MPAA rating: PG-13
Posts: 12252 | Location: Phoenix, AZ | Registered: February 02, 2003
A very strong review from Scott Foundas of THE VILLAGE VOICE...
Iron Man, Mighty Avenger Robert Downey Jr.'s comic-book hero a thing to marvel by Scott Foundas April 29th, 2008 12:00 AM
Chalk it up to personal preference, but I've always been fonder of those comic-book heroes who emerge by intent rather than happenstance. I mean the ones, like Batman's Bruce Wayne, whose transformation from average Joe into masked crusader is an act of will instead of the unintended result of a genetic mutation, a spider bite, or a meteor ride to earth from the outer reaches of the galaxy; the ones who, underneath the metallic breastplates and layers of spandex, remain ordinary bone and sinew.
Tony Stark, the unlikely hero of the Iron Man comics co-created by Stan Lee, Larry Lieber, Don Heck, and Jack Kirby, is one such creation. A boy-genius inventor and heir to a weapons-manufacturing empire, Stark initially conceives of his crime-fighting alter-ego in an act of life-saving self-preservation, donning a makeshift suit of rocket-powered armor in order to escape from the bad guys who've abducted him during a Stark Industries field test. Nothing if not a product of his foreign-policy moment, Stark first appeared in the March 1963 issue of Marvel's Tales of Suspense, just in time to fight the encroaching Red menace in Southeast Asia. In the 2008 film version of Iron Man, directed by Jon Favreau, Stark finds himself at odds with Afghan insurgents called the Ten Rings who, in a wonderful Taliban-era irony, come armed with a black-market supply of Stark's own war machines.
Where Lee and his collaborators based Stark in part on Howard Hughes, the 21st-century version embodied here by Robert Downey Jr. is more like a defense-industry Mark Cuban or Richard Branson—a coiffed and tanned, media-savvy technocrat whose too-cool-for-the-planet attitude says that as long as the market is up and we're kicking Charlie's (or Hadji's) ass, it doesn't much matter how we're doing it. But Stark soon gets his comeuppance in a desert-chic cave where, his shrapnel-riddled heart kept a-ticking by a jerry-rigged electromagnet and a Ten Rings doyen demanding a custom-built smart bomb from Stark's newly deployed "Freedom line," he realizes that maybe WMDs aren't so great after all.
Though he remains best known for writing and co-starring in 1996's hipster totem Swingers, Favreau honed his directing chops with a couple of richly imaginative, resolutely lo-fi kids movies, Elf and Zathura. If the larger-scale, bigger-budget Iron Man never quite ascends to those heights of tinsel-and-string splendiferousness, it maintains Favreau's fondness for the handmade over the prefab, for erector sets over CRPGs. It's an exemplary comic-book fantasia. There's plenty of CGI to go around, but Favreau uses it, for the most part, to enhance rather than supplant the movie's physical dimension.
When Stark returns to his sprawling Malibu mansion/laboratory—a sort of sun-and-surf Batcave—to perfect the prototype, Favreau gives the sequence the slapstick ping of early Blake Edwards or Frank Tashlin. And Downey is—as he is in most of the film—a marvel to watch here, his body a shimmying human jello mold as he tries to get the hang of his newly jet-propelled hands and feet, his face a kaleidoscope of exhilaration and terror. He's like a kid without training wheels for the first time, but also like a man newly resolved to make something meaningful out of his life. More than once in Iron Man, you get the feeling the actor may have seen, in Tony Stark, a serio-comic surrogate for his own very public rehabilitation.
The movie—and I mean this as the highest possible compliment to Favreau and the four credited screenwriters—uses the better part of an hour to really get going. Rather than cutting directly to the chase, it takes its time to involve us in the characters, who are relatively three-dimensional as comic-book movies go, and are played by the kind of actors who know how to make a lot out of not very much. As Stark's dutiful, waiting-to-be-unbuttoned girl Friday, Gwyneth Paltrow is particularly appealing, while the ever-reliable Jeff Bridges manages to invest a glimmer of conflicted humanity in a role that all but comes with "Villain" stamped on its forehead. Even when the plot of Iron Man kowtows to convention, the movie's personality—hip to the times without ever resorting to self-congratulatory snark—keeps it zipping along. Rarer than a grown man in a rocket suit, it's a summer blockbuster that comes to entertain first and shill second.
Just about a year ago at this time, another summer tent-pole that climaxed with giant robots body-slamming each other on the streets of Los Angeles was making its way into cinemas amid much clamor from critics that, no matter what they wrote, people would go see it anyway. The movie was called Transformers—perhaps you've heard of it. Iron Man, too, is something that people will see regardless of the reviews, but here is the point: Where Michael Bay has mastered a kind of sensory-assaulting pop art, Favreau is a born storyteller who engages the audience's imagination rather than crushing it in a tsunami of digital noise. He gives us giant robots we can actually care about as opposed to those we can scarcely tell apart—and that, I would propose, is the difference between making images and making movies.
Posts: 12252 | Location: Phoenix, AZ | Registered: February 02, 2003
A positive review from David Edelstein of NEW YORK MAGAZINE...
Every age gets not the superhero it deserves but the superhero it needs to ease its anxieties: the midwestern farm boy who conquers metropolitan crime; the caped vigilante of the Gotham night; the tortured teen whose sticky excretions become a source of potency; the persecuted freaks whose differences empower them to save the normal folks. Now, in Iron Man, the first of the season’s megabudget comic-book spectaculars, we get an American weapons mogul whose guilt over facilitating the deaths of U.S. soldiers and Mideast civilians impels him to turn off the arms pipeline and rescue Afghans from marauding warlords. The military-industrial complex ravages the Third World—then its former emissary swoops down from the sky in the guise of an impregnable weapon, using his might (and money, and American ingenuity) to undo the damage. Iron Man Akbar! It’s utter, wish-fulfilling crap, but when the whole world hates you, it does feel good.
Iron Man is a shapely piece of mythmaking. The director, Jon Favreau, doesn’t go in for stylized comic-book frames, at least in the first half. He gets real with it—you’d think you were watching a military thriller. After jetting to Afghanistan to demonstrate a guided missile (which launches itty-bitty guided missiles), “billionaire industrialist” and conscienceless playboy Tony Stark (Robert Downey Jr.) gets kidnapped by insurgents, who blow up his convoy and kill his Army escort. He wakes up in a cave, where a kindly Afghan civilian (Shaun Toub) has inserted a magnet in his chest to keep the shrapnel from drifting to his vital organs. The bad guys order Stark to replicate his super-duper weapon. But are they in for a surprise!
The robotic Iron Man has little in the way of an expression, but his eye slots and the circular magnet in his chest have an unearthly glow, and his coloring is warm—gold and trimmed with red, like a sunset. Favreau keeps cutting to Downey’s big head bouncing inside the helmet, somewhat offsetting our knowledge that the Iron Man itself is entirely computer-generated. His first liftoff and crash landing owe a lot to Brad Bird’s incomparable The Iron Giant—although Favreau would probably say it’s “an homage.” At least he steals from the best. A movie like this is a sound designer’s wet dream: thunk, squish, clank, whir, kaboom. The heavy-metal rock that kicks in when Iron Man appears is an aural pun that works like gangbusters—although I wish there were a melody in there somewhere.
A film eighteen years in development, Iron Man passed through several studios before Marvel bought the rights in 2006 and brought in Elf director Jon Favreau, who plans to spin it into a trilogy. In a Yahoo! Movies clip about the James Bond–worthy set (“perched on Point Doom overlooking the Pacific”), Favreau, zipping around on a Segway, looks every bit as zhlubby as he did when he co-starred with Vince Vaughn in Swingers. In the movie itself, he makes a cameo appearance as Tony Stark’s bodyguard, Happy Hogan.
First chapters of superhero sagas are more alike than unalike: The hero tests out his new powers (painfully), amazes his friends and foes, and makes his auspicious debut before the wider world. (What is it? Where did it come from? Is it friendly? Is there a franchise in it?) Then there’s a villain who gets hold of the same technology and uses it for evil instead of good—that’s Obadiah Stane, played by Jeff Bridges with a little beard and a bald dome, making his bid both for Stark’s superpowers and William Hurt’s hold on the ex-leading-man hambone character-actor market.
The casting alone generates tons of goodwill. Who wouldn’t root for Downey as a guy who has to clean up his act? His Stark is a sex addict, a fast-talking heel whose jokes about his own irresponsibility are a hedge against growing up. Downey has such terrific instincts. He demonstrates his transformation by looking as if he has been yanked out of a blissful dream; his self-love dries up and so does his shtick. His loyal assistant, Pepper Potts, isn’t much of a part, but Gwyneth Paltrow is a presence. She stands around looking amused and flabbergastingly pretty, slinging wisecracks with serene aplomb. Bridges makes Stane scarily at ease with his villainy. He’s an inspiring actor: His movie-star vanity never gets in the way of his playing an *******. Only Terrence Howard as Stark’s military liaison Rhodey seems ill used: He’s perilously close to being Jim to Downey’s Huck. Or maybe he’s supposed to be Colin Powell.
Blockbuster action movies often pick up on bad vibes in the air and transform them into something that lets us sleep better at night. In 1989, the same summer Spike Lee dramatized our seemingly unbridgeable differences in Do the Right Thing, Hollywood gave us Lethal Weapon 2, in which an unruly white guy and a middle-class black family man collaborated to destroy the evil representatives of South African apartheid. Poof—racial divisions melted away in a show of righteous force. Iron Man is more family-friendly, but it’s in the same liberal-fantasy tradition. And don’t misunderstand—I loved it. I’d so rather think about blockbusters than bunker-busters (or the Democratic primary).
Posts: 12252 | Location: Phoenix, AZ | Registered: February 02, 2003
A negative review from David Denby in THE NEW YORKER...
In the past twenty years or so, Robert Downey, Jr., has gone through the following stages: a good young actor with a melancholy smile; a good young actor who was also a drug addict, jailbird, and insurance risk; and now, no longer young, an actor who may become the first genuine hipster star since Robert Mitchum and Marlon Brando. Michael Keaton and George Clooney, in the “Batman” series, brought an instinct for satire to comic-book movies, giving their mock-stentorian lines a twist. But Downey, who completely dominates the whooshing junk pile that is “Iron Man,” is on his own wavelength, and he turns the movie into a hundred-and-eighty-five-million-dollar put-on. Sporting a neat, dark Vandyke beard that cuts the air like a knife and complements his glittering black eyes, Downey plays Tony Stark, a billionaire arms manufacturer and playboy. Stark lives in a cliff-hanging Malibu mansion with a gigantic basement that serves as his toy room and his laboratory; his private jet comes equipped with female flight attendants who double as in-flight pole dancers. Nothing matters to him except inventing things and having a good time. Downey, muttering to himself, ignores everyone else in the movie for as long as he can. Fixing his eyes, at last, on another character, he seems faintly annoyed that his privacy has been violated. Yet he delivers—to the camera, and to us. He can make offhandedness mesmerizing, even soulful; he passes through the key moments in this cloddish story as if he were ad-libbing his inner life.
Back in 1963, Stan Lee, working with his brother, the writer Larry Lieber, and with the artists Don Heck and Jack Kirby, created the character of Tony Stark for the Marvel Comics series “Tales of Suspense.” The war in Vietnam was heating up, and Stark brought his newly invented supertransistors to the battlefield, only to get captured and enslaved by Wong-Chu—a chubby Commie tyrant. One might blush at this memory of sinister Orientalist Cold War pop, but the updating of the material for “Iron Man” hasn’t made it any smarter. The director, Jon Favreau, and two writing teams, Mark Fergus and Hawk Ostby, and Art Marcum and Matt Holloway, have enlisted Iron Man in the war on terror. Stark is now showing off his advanced missiles to American forces in Afghanistan. He gets ambushed by a mysterious group of burning-eyed men who hang out in caves and scream in foreign tongues. They are never identified, though their leader, Raza (Faran Tahir), says that they want to conquer the world. In any case, the freelance fanatics, or whatever they are, waterboard Tony Stark, which, considering what some American interrogators and their surrogates have done to suspects recently, is enraging to watch. Such are the ways of pop: we cast our sins onto others. The complaint sounds a little wan, but it’s worth noting that, possibly, more Americans will see this dunderheaded fantasia on its opening weekend than have seen all the features and documentaries that have labored to show what’s happening in Iraq and on the home front.
The fanatics demand that Stark build some of his missiles for them. They’re a little careless, these fellows: though they watch Stark on video cameras, for a long time they manage to miss the evidence that he’s really making a gigantic suit of armor for himself. Downey, beefed up, his torso drenched in sweat, looks like a nineteenth-century blacksmith. As he welds and solders, using spare parts from spent shells (the insurgents possess some of Stark’s own products), the movie briefly becomes engaging as a kind of Erector Set dream of home manufacture. Yet the clanking suit, when it’s finished, is a letdown. Given its provenance, we expect a patchwork—like the battered old spacecraft in “Star Wars”—not the gleaming computer-generated steel plate that we get. And once Stark climbs inside and becomes Iron Man he loses his perverse charm; Downey without eyes is Downey cancelled. Iron Man shoots bullets and emits liquid flame from his gauntlets, and when he gets bored he just flies away. Unlike Superman or Spider-Man, this superhero has no vulnerabilities or specialized skills. He’s an all-purpose fighting vehicle—an airborne Robocop. At one point, he’s chased by two American F-22s, and Favreau and his animators spin him around wildly in the air, but the sequence is more clumsy than enthralling. Without a continuous infusion of visual poetry, digital spectacle quickly burns through one’s sense of awe.
There’s a slightly depressed, going-through-the-motions feel to the entire show. When Stark escapes and comes home, now and then doing battle secretly as Iron Man, almost every scene is played as a joke, but, apart from Downey’s private sense of amusement, the kidding lacks conviction. Gwyneth Paltrow, widening her eyes and palpitating, can’t do much with an antique role as Stark’s girl Friday, who loves him but can’t say so; Terrence Howard, playing a military man who chases around after Stark, looks dispirited and taken for granted. Jeff Bridges, though, performs with skill and persistence as the movie’s true heavy—Obadiah Stane, Stark’s treacherous No. 2 at the arms company. Downey keeps shrugging him off, but Bridges, who has the shaved head and thick beard of an outré professional wrestler from about 1958, refuses to be edged out of the picture. He bear-hugs Downey furiously, all fake affection and murderous envy. The contest between the two begins to amount to something, but then they disappear into their armor and battle like two oversized beetles.
Will “Iron Man” become a franchise? Superhero fantasies have generally drawn their emotional energy from teen-age male frustration, or from early wounds that shaped the heroes’ characters. Bruce Wayne sees his parents killed; Clark Kent’s home planet gets destroyed; the X-Men (and women) are outsiders—mutants—and Peter Parker is a nerd. But Tony Stark is more like James Bond—he’s always on top. At the end, Stark acknowledges to the public, “I am Iron Man,” setting up a possible sequel. Downey has a star’s confidence now, and, if the audience takes to him, he could probably do this insouciant acting turn again. But it would be a bad joke on him—his most unfortunate mishap—if he winds up clanking around in a metal suit forever.
Posts: 12252 | Location: Phoenix, AZ | Registered: February 02, 2003
Wasn't originally going to see it, but the suprisingly strong reviews make me want to see it and since it is the first movie of the summer, that will probably make alot of people want to see it. It might make 100 million this weekend, but I see it somewhere between 85-95 million.
A negative review for the film from THE LOS ANGELES TIMES, though it's positive for Robert Downey Jr...
By Kenneth Turan, Times Movie Critic May 1, 2008 IRON MAN? This is the name for a superhero? Rather than sounding like a six-pack of blue-collar beer, shouldn't the handle for a fighter for truth and justice be something sleek and modern like Titanium Man or even Uranium Al? Isn't Iron Man a little old-school for today's computer-generated movie franchise world?
Don't tell that to the folks at Marvel, whose characters have made a fortune at the box office -- $4.9-billion worldwide gross to date, thank you very much -- starring comic book heroes who were in their prime 40-plus years ago, before much of today's core audience was even alive. Much as we might like to avoid the fact, the comic book movie is clearly the genre of our time.
So here comes "Iron Man," following gamely in the footsteps of "Spider-Man," "X-Men," "Fantastic Four," "Hulk," "Daredevil" and the other Marvel heroes. Directed by Jon Favreau, it's got an energetic, engaging performance by Robert Downey Jr. in the starring role and such an elaborate series of Iron Man suits for him to wear that it takes 10 pages in the production notes to fully describe them.
But though "Iron Man" is diverting enough in the comic-book-movie mode, there is one thing it doesn't have, and that is dramatic unity. Unlike the irreducible element that is its namesake, "Iron Man" the movie is an alloy, a combination of several different and disconnected components that don't manage to unite to make a coherent whole.
Though this feeling is inescapable throughout the film, a key part of the reason isn't clear until the final credits reveal that two different teams of writers (Mark Fergus and Hawk Ostby, and Art Marcum and Matt Holloway) worked on the film. And not just worked on it in any conventional way. As an article in Script magazine details, they happily toiled without meeting on separate-but-equal versions of the script that were eventually merged by Marvel and the director.
In theory, this "one from column A, one from column B" approach might have worked, but in this case it does not. Though many of the film's sequences are fine in and of themselves, when joined together they tend to seem not of a piece, unable to provide the single sweeping narrative we crave. Favreau, who has worked in different genres with mixed success (yes to "Elf," no to "Zathura"), may not have noticed, and, frankly, audiences likely will not either, but the situation remains.
Diversity of tone hardly seems a problem when "Iron Man" opens with high-energy sequences that introduce Downey as billionaire inventor/playboy/merchant of death Tony Stark, a second-generation weapon manufacturer who lives in a Malibu house the size of a small city and spends his free time womanizing, gambling and accepting accolades for being a visionary genius and American patriot.
With his weakness for glib one-liners and throwaway comments ("I need it, buy it, store it," he says of a potential Jackson Pollock purchase), this part has been nicely tailored to Downey's talents and is a great deal of fun as a result.
If Downey slips easily into cartoon mode, his big-name costars have more mixed experiences. Jeff Bridges clearly relishes being Tony's full-bearded and bald partner, Obadiah Stane, while Gwyneth Paltrow runs hot and cold as Tony's loyal assistant Pepper Potts, and the gifted Terrence Howard looks noticably uncomfortable as Tony's long-suffering pal Lt. Col. James "Rhodey" Rhodes.
Sadly, the film's fun-loving party animal Tony is not with us for very long.
Traveling to Afghanistan (actually, it's nearby Lone Pine, Calif.) to demonstrate a new weapon system, Tony gets kidnapped by noticeably cranky jihadists who consider him "the most famous mass-murderer in the history of America" and want him to build them one of his "masterpieces of death" in the dank cave they've imprisoned him in.
Though his heart has been damaged by (how ironic!) shrapnel from one of the bombs his company created, Tony, it turns out, is not a man to mess with. Turning dour and serious, he fools the jihadists, who show themselves to be bears of very little brain, and constructs his first Iron Man suit, which makes him look like an especially fierce refrigerator-freezer.
Once he's back in the U.S. of A., it turns out that time spent in the cave has turned our hero into yet another Tony, this one a touchy-feely guy who believes he has "more to offer the world than making things blow up."
He promptly retreats to his Malibu basement, where he spends far too much of the movie's time in the trial-and-error process of getting his new, improved titanium-and-gold Iron Man suit to work.
I understand that this film is an origin story, but even so, enough is enough.
Yet more Tonys emerge in the rest of "Iron Man," from the Human Rights Watch monitor on steroids who protects innocents in Afghanistan to the superhero who fights a behemoth called Iron Monger in the film's elaborate finale.
With all these Tonys running around, it's not surprising that "Iron Man" feels more convoluted than it needs to be.
Downey's unbeatable charisma makes these problems less troublesome than they would be otherwise, but wouldn't it be nice if they didn't exist at all?
This message has been edited. Last edited by: pacinofan,
Posts: 12252 | Location: Phoenix, AZ | Registered: February 02, 2003
I'm actually very excited to see this. After seeing Robert Downey Jr. in Zodiac, I've really become a fan of his quick-whipped humor. I'll definitely be there for this one.
My Early Early Oscar Predictions:
PICTURE: Revolutionary Road DIRECTOR: David Fincher, Curious Case of Benjamin Button ACTOR: Leonardo DiCaprio, Revolutionary Road or Frank Langella, Frost/Nixon ACTRESS: Meryl Streep, Doubt or Kate Winslet, Revolutionary Road SUPPORTING ACTOR: Heath Ledger, Dark Knight or Robert Downey, Jr., The Soloist SUPPORTING ACTRESS: Amy Adams, Doubt, or Penelope Cruz, Vicky Cristina Barcelona ORIGINAL SCREENPLAY: Burn After Reading or Milk ADAPTED SCREENPLAY: Frost/Nixon, Doubt, or Benjamin Button ANIMATED FEATURE: Wall.E
Posts: 489 | Location: Right behind you. | Registered: December 07, 2007
A positive review from EW, especially for Robet Downey Jr.
After Tobey Maguire's gawky boyishness and Christian Bale's glower, the ''offbeat'' casting of comic-book films is now the new normal. (The trend really started back in 1989, when Tim Burton turned a saucer-eyed noodge like Michael Keaton into Batman.) Yet it's still bracing to see Robert Downey Jr. redefine what it takes to be a superhero in Iron Man. As Tony Stark, a high-living celebrity weapons magnate who is wounded on a trek through Afghanistan, only to transform himself into a hulking mechanical rocket man, Downey doesn't dial down his eager narcissistic wit. Wearing a goatee right out of the beatnik '50s, he's fast and frictionless, as airlessly ironic as a talk-show host who's been shoved onto the air at 3 a.m. and left to his own what-the-hell devices. The key to Downey's mocking, crumpled charm is that no matter whom he's talking to, he's really just nattering to himself. When he climbs into his Iron Man machine suit, with its whirring, clicking limbs and plated chest, flamethrower arms, and mask of a medieval knight, he doesn't disappear behind the tin-can walls of that chunky, atomic-age jet-pack robot. He's still there, a deftly fragile motormouth — a damaged soul who needs armor to fully become himself.
Just about every classic comic-book superhero is, at heart, a Jekyll-and-Hyde, divided between ineffectuality and power. Too often, however, the movies adapted from comic books come with their own split personalities. There's the flat, prosaic story, with all that overbright franchise lighting and actors like Tobey Maguire doing their best to charm us in thinly scripted regular-guy roles. And then there are the special-effects parts, when suddenly we're asked to believe that a man can fly, or shimmy up walls, or dissolve into particles, even as we remain naggingly aware that we're watching a digital extravaganza that has little to do with mopey nice-guy acting.
The fun of Iron Man, a Marvel adaptation in which a routine arc has been burnished with great elegance and skill, is the way that it heals the split, soldering the two halves of its hero into a single organically driven figure. On that fateful Afghan jaunt, Downey's Stark is wounded by one of his own bombs, then kidnapped and taken to an insurgent lair, where a magnetized gizmo is surgically implanted in his chest, all to keep the bits of shrapnel from heading toward his heart. To fool his captors, he pretends to construct the cluster bomb they demand, but instead he builds himself a mechanical alter ego and flies to freedom. Back at his hillside mansion (one of many clever details — it's out of vintage Bond), Stark then erects a new, improved version, with a two-toned shell and computerized mask. His desire? To destroy the weapons that he once created. He becomes a rock-'em sock-'em robot for peace.
The director, Jon Favreau, doesn't exactly have a big sci-fi track record — he wrote and starred in Swingers, and also directed Elf — but he draws on his humanistic gifts to make Iron Man"] a compellingly down-to-earth superhero fantasy. The effects sequences, in which Iron Man zips through the air like a toaster that's been shot out of a cannon, are ingenious enough to never let us forget that this gold-titanium hulk has been built, from the ground up. (When he takes off, you feel the quivering smoky thrust of his engines.) The story line is, to put it mildly, familiar, with all the episode-one bona fides ticking into place. Yet Favreau's direction never feels rote, even during the sky-zipping, metal-smashing action scenes, and the casting is aces. Jeff Bridges, as Stark's corporate partner, looks as scary as a cult leader in his shaved head and bushy beard, but he underacts, benignly; Bridges uses that wry, trust-me voice to create a timely portrait of stylish power. And Gwyneth Paltrow, as Pepper Potts, Stark's selfless girl Friday, manages the neat trick of taking a character who's a prefeminist throwback and playing her with a liberated twinkle. When Pepper replaces Stark's glowing electric heart device, it's a nifty, squishy gross-out and a terrific love scene. Too often, superhero films feel like a different species of entertainment from the smudged comic books that spawned them. Iron Man takes you back to the days when you sprawled out in front of those books, flipping through the adventures of a dude who was too vital, and vulnerable, to ever be a mere F/X object. Even at his coolest, Downey's Iron Man remains a ghostly, neurotic crusader — one whose life, in the Marvel tradition, has become a grand spectacle of overcompensation. B+
Next year's Emmys, I want to see "The Shield" nominated!
Posts: 1775 | Location: Long Island | Registered: January 30, 2003
There's no rust on this baby. Iron Man kicks off summer on a blazing high note and practically dares the competition to measure up. It's been years since a movie superhero was this fierce and this funny. All praise to acting dynamo Robert Downey Jr., who brings so much creative juice to the party that Iron Man achieves instant liftoff. Even if you know diddly about the character Marvel built in 1963, Downey and director Jon Favreau — just the right swinger for the job — will get you up to speed pronto. Hard to believe that Iron Man and his alter ego, Tony Stark, have never been exploited as movie subjects before. Could it be that Stark, the boozing, lecherous, right-wing manufacturer of WMDs, scared off stars less willing to take a risk than Downey? Screw 'em. You can feel the exhilaration in the telling and updating of this origin story, with a script polish by no less than Mark Fergus and Hawk Ostby, the writers behind the brilliant Children of Men. Iron Man is a class act all the way. What kind of popcorn flick gets the great, dangerously charming Jeff Bridges to shave his head to play Obadiah Stane, the chief villain? Or Terrence Howard to add mystery to Rhodey, Tony's military adviser? Or Oscar princess Gwyneth Paltrow to show the smarts and sexiness of Pepper Potts, Tony's leggy assistant? Don't question, just lap it up.
As Tony gets blown up by his own weapons in Afghanistan — nothing like a near-death experience to trigger a switch to peace politics — he uses the three months of lockup by insurgents to build an iron suit that powers his shrapnel-shattered heart and helps him escape back to his L.A. workshop. There he adds some hot-red color to build an even cooler suit and begin his life as a superhero. "Spectacular" is the word, even when the plot gears grind from the strain. What matters is the raw vitality. Iron Man is the **** because Favreau (Made, Elf) is too funky to settle for slick. And Downey does something even more resonant for this flying hunk of metal: He gives Iron Man a soul.
Next year's Emmys, I want to see "The Shield" nominated!
Posts: 1775 | Location: Long Island | Registered: January 30, 2003
I think its best to make sure the critic gets credit for his/her review. Many major newspapers and magazines have multiple critics so it is not always clear. Ew has two major critics and many second string critics.
This message has been edited. Last edited by: pacinofan,
Posts: 12252 | Location: Phoenix, AZ | Registered: February 02, 2003
