In the old days, people looked to the weather, or possibly Stonehenge, to determine the coming of the seasons. These days, the pop-culturally savvy need only flip to the movie listing. May is here, and with it comes another gloriously goofy FX extravaganza with a budget big enough to make Bill Gates balk. This year’s summer-blockbuster herald is
Iron Man, a comic-book hero in a snazzy red and yellow robo-suit. As cinematic metal men go, Iron Man doesn’t quite deliver the marshmallow-cereal-powered jolt of last year’s robo spectacular
Transformers — but then, this film nearly makes sense. As with all things in life, there are trade offs.
Well, unless you’re Tony Stark — a nattily dressed defense-industry playboy whose sense of self-worth would be massively inflated were it not actually somewhere in the bazillions. It is perhaps not coincidental, and certainly appropriate, that his name sounds a lot like Tony
Snark, particularly since Robert Downey Jr. plays the role. Like his superheroic alter-ego, Downey’s Stark is something of a machine, cranking out a continuous stream of Triple-A rated hipster irony (or is it
iron-y?). Watching Downey breezily quip his way through the film is a great pleasure, and no matter how bad the inevitable sequels are, I will enthusiastically line up to see them just to watch him operate.
Tony Stark is both the genius engineer behind Stark Industries and its chief salesman, and as we first meet him, he’s overseas riding across a desert in a convoy of Humvees. Afghan terrorists attack the convoy spirit Stark away to — where else? — a cave. The brutes have no specific ambitions — world domination is mentioned in passing — but eventually they order Stark to build a missile for them. Despite being supervised by his captors, Stark builds a clunky (though powerful) suit of armor instead. How the villains missed this, exactly, is unclear — though in their defense, they
were living in a cave.
Stark escapes the cave and returns to his palatial, glass-walled Malibu mansion. There, aided by his loyal assistant, Pepper Potts (Gwyneth Paltrow, returning to the big screen in a role so old-fashioned it might be insulting were it not so cute), he builds another suit — this one a trimmer fit — and gets into an escalating series of disputes with his Stark Industries business partner, Obadiah Stane (Jeff Bridges). The name alone should let you know he’s up to no good, but if not, the bald pate and prominent beard should do it. Bridges towers in every frame he’s in; he clearly beefed up for the role. Add in a wide tailored suit, a fat class ring, and a ubiquitous cigar, and he comes across as a cross between James Gandolfini and a gorilla — top-notch supervillain material.
Director Jon Favreau is a less obvious choice. Known mostly as the lovable shlub in
Swingers, he’s been building up his cred behind the camera of late. As a stylist, he’s functional, and occasionally witty — though not much more. But he keeps the pace brisk enough so that the regular doses of nonsense barely have time to register, and gives the production a cheery, four-color feel — like it was inked by a seasoned comic-book hand. And for those with a taste for winking self-reference, there’s a kitschy heavy-metal soundtrack throughout — the movie-score equivalent of deadpan — but, to his credit, Favreau delays playing Black Sabbath’s “Iron Man” until the closing credits. (Clearly, the man has heroic reserves of willpower.)
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