Ah, summertime. The temperature increases, everything turns green and the sun stays up past 7 o’clock. It’s a wonderful time of year to be outside, celebrated by barbecues, booming fireworks and blockbusters with budgets bigger than the gross domestic product of most African countries. Starting this year’s parade of summer movies is Iron Man, one of the better comic book adaptations in recent years.
Iron Man tells the story of billionaire weapons industrialist Tony Stark (Robert Downey Jr.). After being captured by Afghani terrorists, he is forced to build his most recent weapon for their own malicious use. Instead, Stark builds a suit of iron to dispatch of his captors. Upon returning home, he decides to design a new suit to fix the things he helped destroy with his weapons.
The movie spends most of its time watching Stark build his two very different suits from scratch, which only helps to showcase his social isolation. Unfortunately this doesn’t make for a very entertaining chunk of the movie, even with a few shots of humor involving a robotic arm and its obsession with fire extinguishers. Thankfully some surprisingly good character interaction with his assistant Pepper Potts (Gwyneth Paltrow) and a few excuses to get out of the house manage to break up this dominating part of the movie.
Stealing the show in Iron Man are Paltrow and Downey Jr. thanks to an excellent script that allows both actors to showcase their wit and humor. Both of their characters are also given more depth than most super hero movies do in an entire trilogy. Every scene these two are in together is easily one of the best.
The action is held to a relative minimum, but there is still plenty to be enjoyed. Seeing the red and yellow suit in action is quite a payoff after watching the oversized, ugly-looking iron suit tear the terrorists to shreds. Aside from some suit tests, there are really only three scenes of hefty action, the first of which comes about a third into the movie and the last two which come late in the movie. Once again, building the suit takes up a good part of this movie.
Director Jon Favreau has put together an excellent movie plagued only by its obsession with constructing its hero’s suit. Even so, Iron Man makes up for it by delivering on all fronts for the rest of the movie. There’s still plenty to play with in regards to the two main characters, and with the sequel already green-lighted, I can’t wait for an Iron Man movie where the suit comes pre-built.
Filed under: Review | Tagged: Jeff Mason
