Positive Liberty

Iron Man grossed just a tad short of $100 million on its opening weekend, ushering in the summer movie season with its first big hit. Nothing Constant Viewer could possibly write at this point can change that fact even given his huge influence with literally dozens of potential moviegoers, but it must nonetheless be said that, however many good things there may be about Iron Man, they do not all add up to make a good movie.

Here’s the thing. Superhero origin movies are difficult at best to pull off such that (1) preexisting fans’ canonical expectations are satisfied while (2) the non-cognoscenti walk out thinking they saw a self-contained piece of entertainment. There must, after all, ultimately be more going on than simply how Spandex Man came to be tarted up in special effects, and that something more is technically defined as a story.

In Iron Man, that story is that fabulously wealthy, genius playboy arms merchant Tony Stark idiotically demonstrates his company’s latest weapon system in the Middle East as opposed to, say, Arizona, thereby idiotically permitting himself to be kidnapped by Middle Eastern bad guys who, for reasons of estimated impact on total world grosses, are only generically anti-American and whose leader is perfectly willing to cut a deal with an even badder and, for reasons of estimated impact on total world grosses, decidedly non-Middle Eastern bad guy.

Necessity being the mother of invention, the injured Stark manages despite being held captive in a cave to upgrade in a week or so from the world’s least portable pacemaker to a dilithium crystal powered flux capacitor, to cobble together sufficient armor plating to deflect his captives’ conventional yet hardly insignificant firepower and, oh by the way, to jury-rig a Wily Coyote type jetpack to propel him sufficiently far from the bad guys to escape without, as a result, killing himself on impact, too. So far we can all agree it’s pretty plausible, no?

Anyway, to make a long (and largely tedious) story mercifully shorter, Stark survives, develops a guilty conscience about the fact that his weapons are being used to kill white people, too, and swiftly progresses through the three classic comic book Iron Man looks with the help of a robotic arm with more personality than half the rest of the cast. The obligatory super-villain emerges and, not a moment too soon, a battle ensues. When the CGI dust settles the sequel is set up.

Look, casting Robert Downey, Jr. as Tony Stark was a stroke of genius and it was wonderful that Downey could work the film into his schedule between rehabs. Gwyneth Paltrow’s quasi-romantic interest works well, giving Paltrow’s much publicized stiletto heel fetish an opportunity to be put on display on the talk show circuit. Jeff Bridges plays the unhappy arms merchant partner and Terrance Howard plays the sympathetic black man role as well as their parts permit. The directing, camera work and special effects are brisk and effective. In fact, everything about Iron Man works except Iron Man. Taken as a whole, it is simply too predictable to engender the slightest bit of dramatic tension from the point where Stark escapes from the cave.

The fact is that Iron Man is splashy and big-screen worthy and just about everything a summer blockbuster should be except a good movie. If you haven’t seen it already, by all means don’t let Constant Viewer stop you. But don’t say he recommended it, either.

Trackback URI | Comments RSS