Corridor Buzz - The Premier Source of Arts & Entertainment News and Information for the Cedar Rapids/Iowa City Corridor

REVIEW: ‘Iron Man’ built for gleeful speed

By Locke Peterseim

The start of the summer blockbuster season is a lot like baseball’s Opening Day. Hopes are high, records are clean, every movie a potential champion. That desperate optimism can give an artificial heady glow to the first film out of the chute: nobody wants to start the glorious summer season off with a thud.

Luckily “Iron Man” is delightfully thud-free. You know the Marvel superhero movie basics: this time, billionaire weapons designer and drunken playboy Tony Stark undergoes a Road to Kabul change of heart—literally—and decides to put his technological genius toward building a truly smart bomb: an ass-kicking rocket suit he can fly around in and use to blast evil-doers.

The joy of “Iron Man” is that while it knows it has to deliver certain super-hero beats and CGI-driven action set-pieces, it does so with a self-assured charm and deft touch. All of that springs fully from its director, Jon Favreau, and its star, Robert Downey, Jr. Favreau has steadily built box-office goodwill with solid, well-made films like “Elf,” “Zahtura” and “Made.” But the director, who of course also wrote “Swingers,” is not an auteur, not a wild visionary. At this point he’s yet to show anything resembling a brilliantly original cinematic idea. But so what? He’s a consummate craftsman, an old-fashioned storyteller from the golden days of the studio system. The result—and this may be blasphemy—is an action film with a twinge of that old “Raiders of the Lost Ark” magic: enjoyably outrageous, filled with humor and action, but never stupid.

But onscreen it’s Downey, Jr. who delivers “Iron Man.” His Tony Stark is spot-on, all smug bravado hiding secret pain and sadness. But rather than tamp things down to Batman-levels of brooding, Downey’s Stark makes “Iron Man”—the film and the suit—dance, whether it’s with his huge, almost cartoonish, eyes, or his sharp, sardonic tongue.

(It’s a fascinating and encouraging trend, the casting of these new superhero movies. Offbeat casting began with Michael Keaton in Tim Burton’s original “Batman” and continued through Tobey McGuire in “Spider-man,” but lately studios have gone even deeper, hiring actual heavy-lifting actors: Downey, Jr. here, Christian Bale and Heath Ledger in the new “Batman” series, and coming up later this summer, Ed Norton in “The Incredible Hulk.” Sure, you run the risk of having too serious of an actor gum up the works—we shall see, Mr. Norton, we shall see!—but overall these actors bring their power tools to whatever role they tackle.)

While Fav’s light touch and Downey, Jr.’s bottomless charm keep “Iron Man” aloft, overall the film is pretty standard super-hero fare. An origin story, a star-crossed love interest, nefarious villains yearning for super powers of their own, rock-em-sock-em action smash-ups. And like many superhero action films, it sometimes feels more like a collection of set pieces than a cohesive story.

In fact, “Iron Man” is so juiced by Downey, Jr.— not to mention top-notch support from Terrance Howard as Stark’s pal and Jeff Bridges as his business partner—that while it is terrific fun to watch Stark build and test the suit, once he’s encased in it and blasts off, the movie slumps just a bit. (Meanwhile, Gwyneth Paltrow as Pepper Potts, Stark’s potential Best Gal, manages to suck the life out of every scene she’s in.) The Iron Man flying scenes are nicely handled, but never fully soar, and the film’s big rocket vs. robot battle finale literally falls to Earth. Still, credit to Favreau for constructing fight scenes in which—ahem, Michael Bay—you can actually tell what’s going on and who’s fighting whom. Plus, the movie’s end has not one, but two pitch-perfect, non-exploding surprise notes.

“Iron Man” also takes a super-hero-depth swipe at a few Big Issues. The moral quandary of the military industrial complex is picked up, toyed with and then eventually left behind as the film rockets ahead. Of all the big-time movie superheroes these days, Iron Man is not an alien, not a border-line psychopath scarred by childhood tragedy, not the victim of a science experiment gone wrong, not a mutant. He’s certainly not an outsider. Stark is the All-American Can-do Know-how Individualist Entrepreneur (not to mention that other half of the American Dream: the filthy rich, playboy party-guy). The hero was originally created in 1963 as the ultimate Cold Warrior, a Space-Race Rocket Man, a Human Missile Defense System. That his new 21st-century adventures take him to Afghanistan is no coincidence.

But most of all, “Iron Man” is, like the suit’s cherry-red paint suggests, a revved up hot rod of a movie. It’s not going to take you around any big, sharp curves, but it gets you where you need to be with an exhilarating rush. “Iron Man” is built for gleeful speed and it happily delivers.