Rye Silverman returns from his undisclosed location to review Iron Man
Iron Man is a character that I never in my history of comic book fandom cared about. When talk first started circulating about an Iron Man movie, my thought was “I guess they’re hitting them all eventually,” considering that we’ve already been subjected to Ghost Rider and Daredevil/Elektra. Especially now that Marvel has founded their very own studio so that they can produce movies themselves instead of selling the rights and points on the back end to others, it seems fairly certain that their catalog of heroes isn’t going to be closing itself off to the multiplex any time soon.
But after seeing Iron Man, I’m sort of ok with that. Provided of course, that the movies they make are more like Iron Man and less like the Fantastic Four franchise. It isn’t that Iron Man is any amazing special film, but it isn’t terrible. In the spectrum of superhero movies, it falls somewhere maybe slightly behind the first X-Men, but well in front of the awful third one. It isn’t Spiderman II, Hellboy, or Batman Begins. But it certainly isn’t Daredevil.
There is one thing and one thing alone that makes Iron Man such an enjoyable movie. Robert Downey Jr. The script is ok, and Jon Favreau does a pretty decent ass job in the director’s chair for it too, but it is Downey that carries the weight of the movie on his metal clad shoulders. He plays Tony Stark with such a flair for delightful bastardness, yet does not fall short at the moments when he must also show real emotion, real conflict as his character realizes his place in the world.
Downey brings to the table the most enjoyable performance in a popcorn movie since Johnny Depp set sail as Captain Jack Sparrow in the first Pirates of the Caribbean movie. Despite Stark’s personal conflicts, he is the least angst-ridden super hero in recent memory, delighting in every moment he spends refining and eventually kicking evil ass in his suit. It is an interesting twist on the paradigm of the costumed hero that Stark is more weighed down by the impact on the world he has created as a normal person, albeit a larger than life normal person, than he does as a costumed crusader. His joy in being a superhero reminds us of something often forgotten in many of the overly dark failures in comic book adaptations the last few years, the reason so many little kids want to be superheroes in the first place: it looks kind of fun.
Grade: B