Iron Man (2008)

This was written back in July, but I'm just getting around to posting it. Oh well:

Pretty much as good as a superhero movie can be nowadays. Spiderman 3 kind of fizzled out that franchise. Fantastic 4, X-Men 3, The Punisher and Ghost Rider were all kind of duds in an oversaturated dud market, so it's good we have a couple of Iron Man movies to look forward to. That and Batman. And Hellboy also. Anyway, this was directed by co-Swinger Jon Favreau, which seems weird since his few directing credits (Elf, Zathura) wouldn't naturally lead to mega-budget action films. Maybe Zathura was mega-budget action. Who knows, I don't think anyone saw it.

Half of this movie was the set up for how Tony Stark becomes Iron Man, but not knowing anything about Iron Man, or comic books in general, I could have sworn the movie was thinking about ending right there in the middle of Afghanistan or wherever they were. But it takes a couple breaths and ratchets back up for an awesome 2nd half.

What made this movie so great for me is the mixture of special effects (there were over 300 animators) and droll humor. Robert Downey Jr. seems like he's almost improvising at times, just riffing and having fun being there, and the scenes between he and Jeff Bridges (especially the pizza scene) are loose and natural. And I mean, is there no actor looser than Jeff Bridges? Iron Man was kind of like Ghostbusters in this way for me, really effects heavy action paired with off the cuff, dry comedy (the line "It's like Operation!"). I'd imagine the atmosphere on the set was really conducive to that kind of stuff, with Favreau and game actors like these guys who just seems like they're having a blast. And during the final showdown between Bridges' Ironmonger (at this point very un-"dude" like) and Iron Man, I was having so much fun, I had forgotten about the plot contrivances that had got them into this battle in the first place: like, why does Obadiah Stane want to kill Iron Man anyway? It wasn't quite clear how much of a threat Stark's newfound pacifism was to his company, and the reason Obadiah hires the Ten Rings in the first place got lost in the whole reveal. Really. It seems obvious, but after thinking about it later, I realize it didn't make sense.

Thankfully the Black Sabbath song was never used in the film. Instead there was a slightly reminiscent, nu-metal-ly theme every time homeboy puts on the iron suit, which seemed more appropriate. And then only the guitar solo from the Sabbath song was used during end credits, also cool. AND per my friend Bill's advice, we stayed past the end credits to see Nick Fury set us up for The Avengers movie.