Review: Iron Man

THE MAN IN THE IRON MASK

Robert Downey, Jr. makes a great superhero in a well-made – if somewhat routine – comic-book saga.

MAY 2, 2008 – SOMEWHERE IN THE KUNAR PROVINCE IN AFGHANISTAN, Tony Stark (Robert Downey, Jr.) is being escorted someplace in a military vehicle. The soldiers around are understandably in awe – not just because he’s a billionaire arms manufacturer who’s recently unveiled to the world his brightest, shiniest, new toy (a spectacular missile system), but also because he’s a legendary ladies’ man. One of the army escorts wonders aloud if it’s true that Stark went “12 for 12 with last year’s Maxim cover models.” Sloshing his drink around in its glass, Stark deadpans that the facts are correct, but perhaps the figures aren’t: one of those covers involved twins. Now, this much you can imagine any other leading man – George Clooney, for instance – do. It’s no stretch for the one-time Batman to play a playboy who’s mastered the art of the dapper comeback. But much later, when Stark’s unfortunately named woman-Friday – Pepper Potts (a charming Gwyneth Paltrow) – reminds him about a ceremony he has to attend at MIT sometime in the future, and when he admonishes her not to “harangue” him just yet, you can’t imagine Clooney milking the same effects out of this word. He’d have wrapped his silken bass around it, and in the process, he’d have reduced it to an understated, invisible purr. It wouldn’t have leapt out and jabbed you cheekily in the side, reminding you how unusual its presence is in an American movie of late, let alone a superhero movie.

Once that body suit comes on and once that mask envelops the face, pretty much any gym-ripped slab of meat could play Iron Man – but Downey convinces us that only he could have played Stark. Or at least, only he could have made Stark – a man described as “constitutionally incapable of being responsible” – such an unusually blithe addition to our groaning canon of angsty superheroes. For one thing, his line readings are utterly unpredictable. You never know which part of a sentence he’s going to seize and underline, and hearing him speak, you realise what a real actor – a vital, charismatic actor – can do with the most overplayed of parts (in this case, the superhero before he became a superhero). When we see Christian Bale in Batman Begins, we are left in no doubt that this a good actor before us, but Bale, on screen, is almost always a dour presence, just as Batman himself is not exactly a barrel of laughs. But Downey is that rare combination of a performer who’s also an entertainer – there’s always that bad-boy glint in his eyes that makes it appear he doesn’t take the business of acting very seriously, which is perhaps the reason he’s so fun to watch – and this quality goes a long way towards redeeming the rather lightweight Iron Man, which, without its leading man, would surely have been yet another routine saga of a man in a silly suit out to save the world.

The casting’s the thing in these first installments of superhero movies, because otherwise, they’re brewed up every single time with the same ingredients. Iron Man may not be powered by a red sun or by radioactivity – early on, it’s by a car battery connected to an electromagnet in his chest to keep shrapnel from an explosion from entering his heart – but very little else is different. You still have to show the man he used to be before you show the man he will become. You still have to bring in a potential love interest who may or may not stumble upon the secret identity of her man. You still have to have that wow visual-effects sequence where our hero learns to control his powers. And you still have to orchestrate the superhero’s grand face-off with the supervillain (Jeff Bridges, who’s shaved his head and grown a beard, perhaps because there’s not much else he can contribute to his cardboard-cutout embodiment of evil). All of this is handled fairly well, though the fact that Stark is an arms manufacturer lends itself to peculiar real-life parallels. He’s an American whose weapons are sustaining the wars in Afghanistan – and presumably the Middle East and everywhere else – and the way director Jon Favreau sees it, Stark’s rebirth as an upholder of peace comes through the destruction of his own weapons, which are smelted down and forged into Iron Man’s blast-proof suit. If only. What a better place the world would be if it were run by Hollywood.

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Posted in: Cinema: English