BEFORE: Finally getting to this one, I saved it for the weekend because my wife wanted to watch it with me...
THE PLOT: When wealthy industrialist Tony Stark is forced to build an armored suit after a life-threatening incident, he ultimately decides to use its technology to fight against evil.
AFTER: See, this is what I was talking about - here Iron Man's origin is moved to what looks like Afghanistan, which is timely, though it doesn't really matter. The basics of the story remain the same - millionaire inventor gets wounded, kidnapped, and escapes by building a giant suit of armor.
What really works, in this age of special effects where filmmakers can control every pixel, is that fact that nearly anything can be made to look realistic on-screen now. So the story can really expand, and anything can be shown - battles with tanks, missiles, jets - and the abilities of the Iron Man armor are only limited by the writers' and director's imaginations.
Tony Stark's real super-power is his mind, his inventive nature that can tinker with car engines, missile systems, and ultimately a high-tech suit, constantly upgrading and tweaking it until it can do whatever he wants it to. And once he decides that his company is no longer in the weapons business, he's free to focus all of his attention and invention on the armor, Mark 2.0.
But...a weapons designer who thinks that the path to peace comes from building bigger and bigger weapons? Then, once he sees the error in his ways, and decides that he's not going to deal weapons any more, he decides to help mankind by building a suit...one that's loaded with weapons? Is he Iron Man or Irony Man?
The sequences in Afghanistan were very tense, and dark, in both senses of the word. Don't they have any lights in those underground caves? Maybe it was our TV, but it was very hard for me to tell what was going on while Tony was building the first set of Iron Man armor. The other technical complaint is that Robert Downey Jr. tended to mumble his lines - we had to turn on the captioning to pick up all of his dialogue.
The special effects are amazing, they're the real star of the film - and the story does a servicable job of introducing Iron Man into the world of cinema. But I had a real problem with the main villain of the film, and not because I kept thinking of Jeff Bridges as "The Dude" from "The Big Lebowski". No, the problem was that he sort of turned himself into a bigger, stronger, more destructive version of Iron Man (I pretty much saw it coming, since Obadiah Stane became a villain called Iron Monger in issue #200 of the comic).
So the battle scenes between Iron Man and his evil doppleganger were very reminiscent of the ones between Hulk and the Abomination in "The Incredible Hulk" - and a similar theme also popped up in "X-Men Origins" with Wolverine battling Sabretooth, and for that matter, "Spider-Man 3" featured Venom, a bigger, badder version of Spider-Man. I'm upset that it took me 4 films to spot the pattern - but now that I see it, I realize that these Marvel movies have all been riffing on the same evil-twin motif. They're all solid, enjoyable, action-packed films, but you shouldn't go back to that well too many times.
Anyway, since Michele joined me for tonight's film, I'll let her say a couple words - literally - in one of her patented two-word reviews. If you recall, her review of "The Incredible Hulk" was "enough, already." But tonight, she was a little more impressed and entertained, because the phrase she said several times was "very cool."
Tonight I celebrate not just the end of my superhero chain, but the end of the entire genre on my list - at least until I get a copy of "Iron Man 2". I've seen every comic-book hero film that I set out to (19 in a row, very respectable) - so I can stroll into the convention center in San Diego with pride. I suppose technically I've never seen "Supergirl", "The Rocketeer", "Steel" or "Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles", but I'm OK with that. I do have two more "Blade" films, but I'm saving those for October's horror line-up.
Also starring Terence Howard, Gwyneth Paltrow, Jon Favreau (the director made a cameo as Happy Hogan, nice...), with Paul Bettany as the voice of the JARVIS computer, and Stan Lee in a cameo as a Hugh Hefner-type.
RATING: 8 out of 10 sportscars
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