Iron Man (Jon Faverau, 2008): USA

Reviewed by Richard Feilden.  Viewed in Theater

Summer is here. It’s not the brilliant rays of sunlight baking Santa Barbara that announced it, but the gleaming gold and red armor that bedecks the hero of the first of the summer blockbusters, Iron Man. And just like the test flights shown in the trailer, this one misses the mark.

Iron Man is the story of billionaire playboy Tony Stark. Stark inherited his father’s arms business when his parents were killed in a car crash and is a genius to boot. Whilst visiting an unnamed middle-eastern country to demonstrate his new Jericho missiles to the U.S. military he is captured by militants. Stark discovers that these people are using weapons produced by his company to wage their war against America and to terrorize their own countries populations. In order to escape he builds a suit of powered armor and sets about righting the wrongs that his businesses profits have been built upon.

If the billionaire-playboy-righting-wrongs shtick sounds familiar, it’s because Iron Man is in many ways Marvel’s answer to DC’s Batman. Switch out the murdered parents for alcoholism and you have the same ‘tortured soul who has the resources to do the things which others can’t’ that was handled so much more effectively in Batman Begins. Gaping plot holes aside (who on earth travels to a war-torn country to demonstrate a new weapons system?) the film has a major problem with its tone. It can’t quite work out if it wants to be a jokey Fantastic Four (a film far worse than this one, even with its faults!) slapstick comedy, with test flights that throw Stark into walls and arguments with intelligent robotic fire extinguishers that emote like Pixar’s Luxo Jr, or a dark, savage tale like the aforementioned Batman. The Iron Man suit is designed to kill and destroy so when it is turned against the terrorists that is exactly what it does. It punches them through walls, blows them up with missiles and roasts them with flame throwers. And then we get more comedy. At one point Stark, faced with a group of terrified militia who have taken cover behind human shields, pops out a little multi-barreled gun which shoots all of them in the head simultaneously. The audience at my screening, apparently thinking this was all part of the hi-jinks they had seen in the scene before, burst into spontaneous laughter. Four men, shot dead, biggest laughs in the film. That is worrying.

The film also gets bogged down a little too much with the creation of Iron Man. We spend too much time watching Tony batter metal in a furnace or engage in comedy flight and weapons tests. We also get a half hearted attempt at tying the film to current events with a transparent ‘we should be careful whom we arm’ message which is quickly overtaken by one involving corporate greed. On the plus side Robert Downey Jr. is as watchable as ever and the CGI is pretty spectacular. At least Faverau has the sense to keep the camera still and not cut every half second, raising the action sequences far above the fare handed out in last year’s robot-fest, Transformers.

I wanted to like this film. Super-hero pictures are my guilty pleasure. I did enjoy the directors obvious knowledge of the Iron Man history (with everything from his cameo to the introduction of S.H.I.E.L.D. referencing elements of the comic), but I wish he could have worked out which film he wanted to create. Abandon the slapstick and give us the darker, twisted world of Tony Stark in what I’m guessing will be the inevitable sequel.


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