Congratulations, Hollywood! You've made a Marvel Comics superhero movie that doesn't suck. Now, was that so hard?
Okay, perhaps I'm being a little unfair here. After all, the Bryan Singer-directed X-Men movies didn't exactly suck. But I think we all agree that they don't reside in the memory the way conceivably better ones might have. And there are many Ang Lee fans who might prefer to regard Lee's Hulk as an ambitious misfire as opposed to an out-and-out stinker. Heck, I might be one of them.
So let's put it this way, which is probably less catchy: Iron Man is the first Marvel Comics superhero movie I would willingly sit through a second time. This is the result not just of what the movie does, but what the movie doesn't do. One reason Iron Man doesn't suck as a Marvel adaptation is that it smartly sticks to the spirit of what made Marvel comics so entertaining during its '60s Golden Age. (An age, incidentally, when the give-and-take between movies and comics was beginning to be forthrightly acknowledged by creators in both mediums, an age when Stan Lee and Alain Resnais could collaborate on screenplays together.) The movie has a hefty dose of Marvel irreverence in the persons of its lead character and leading man. Robert Downey, Jr. has quite a few tricks in his performing bag, and one of the most effective is the way he can lay down the indolent snark while illuminating the wounded heart behind said snark, and not make the whole ball of emotional ambivalence feel yucky or manipulative. But also, he's really good at laying down the snark, as he does early in the film with some U.S. soldiers, a few coworkers, and most effectively, a comely female journalist from Vanity Fair (Leslie Bibb) who confronts genius/enfant terrible arms manufacturer Stark with indignant questions about his abrogation of moral responsibility and is next seen, predictably enough, in bed with him. (One of the major subtexts of the film is the familiar Hollywood notion that charm always trumps ideology. Either that, or the movie's just saying that Vanity Fair writers are easy.) It's interesting — the Tony Stark of the '60s comic wasn't quite the wisecracker that Downey's Stark is, but that's what I mean about the film sticking to the spirit of Marvel.
Another way it sticks to the spirit of Marvel is in the eye-popping action sequences, which always come in at the right time; and in the great tradition of martial arts films, each one is a little hotter and crazier than the last. One problem with superhero movies — or I should say, with what aspires to be the first movie in a superhero franchise — is that they are invariably (and, indeed arbitrarily) origin stories. And, with the possible exception of the Book of Genesis, origin stories are boring. (That's why a lot of superhero comics didn't present their origin stories until a few issues into a given series, which is why the first-film rule cited above is indeed arbitrary.) Director Favreau and screenwriters Mark Fergus and Hawk Ostby and Art Marcum and Matt Holloway put a contemporary and action-packed spin on Stark's transformation from glib, high-living mogul to self-made superhero and man on a mission, locating the action to Afghanistan and having Stark ambushed, kidnapped, and forced to concoct a weapon for power-mad warlord Raza (Faran Tahir). Instead Stark creates the powerful electromagnet that keeps his heart going despite the shrapnel now surrounding it, and a prototype of the armor that will forge his new identity.
VIEW FILM STILLS: Iron Man
