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Iron Man (2008)

Director: Jon Favreau

Critics' rating

Average user rating

5 reviews

Synopsis

The latest Marvel comic book to receive a big screen adaptation, this one stars Robert Downey Jr. as the titular tycoon-cum-superhero.

Movie review

From Time Out New York

Heavy comes free of charge with Iron Man, no matter what your frame of reference—Black Sabbath’s face-melting metal anthem or Marvel’s Cold War–spawned superhero. So it’s a sweet surprise that this long-awaited Hollywood version has lightness in mind.

Paced swiftly by ex-Swinger Jon Favreau, the movie is blessed by motormouthed Robert Downey Jr. as billionaire tech genius Tony Stark, an apolitical man with stripper poles on his private plane. Much was made of this “risky” casting, but it pays off beautifully. Downey, already a walking comic strip, imparts crucial verve to Favreau’s static compositions; his glib Stark, launching smart bombs between sips of Scotch and busting out of Afghan terrorist captivity with a half-amused shrug, is dangerously appealing in a P.J. O’Rourke way.

Of course, Iron Man becomes about Stark’s reawakening: Struck by conscience, he closes his arms factory—and for a giddy moment, you wonder if a studio movie might be taking on the whole of the military-industrial complex. (The overgrown MIT geek then weaponizes his body in a sequence of tests as fun as anything in RoboCop.) But here, actually, is the sole problem with the film: Suddenly, it’s too conventional. It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to correctly identify Jeff Bridges’s bald coexec as the Halliburtonian antagonist-to-be.

But Iron Man is one blockbuster that can’t end with a typical mano a mano slugfest, no matter how roboticized and Transformers-like. We want planes, tanks, enraged Congressional speeches. Such is the promise of the character that you feel like the franchise will get there. (Many hints are planted.) Then we’ll really see some heavy.

Author: Joshua Rothkopf

Time Out New York Issue 657: May 1 - 7, 2008

User reviews of this film

dave said...

Posted on May 10 2008 20:31 Might be the best of all the super hero movies.
Very inyeresting and exiting throughout the movie.

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borrisbatanov said...

Posted on May 06 2008 21:43 Movie benefits greatly from the disaffected cynicism and wounded
idealism of Robert Downey Jr., but suffers from a paucity of
white-knuckle action. (Downey is as usual Downey, always the same
character.)
Too much time spent building the iron men, not enough using them.
What little power FX violence there is, to tell the truth, isn't all
that imaginative, all that thrilling, especially by today's standards.
Movie lapses too often into lulls in action.
Villains are relatively uninteresting, not that scary.
Paltrow, for once, is just right (childbearing has made her more of a woman, less mannequin).
For once, too, a comic-book action-hero flick worth seeing.
Opinion: Big-budget FX-heavy blockbusters are currently the best
Hollywood can do, best suited to the limitations of mainstream
commercial American film-making. Naturalistic mature adult drama, by
contrast, is practically nonexistent. The simple comic-book universe,
leavened by self-conscious pseudosophisticated irony, is ideally suited
to the corporate hounds of Sunset Blvd, to their crippled creativity
and imagination, to their cowardice and addiction to manipulative
digitization. Are we losing our ability to tell each other stories, to
share a common dream? Whereas cinema used to spring from the stage and
literature, it now derives from the pulp pages of comic books.
No doubt, we can look forward to endless sequels, each worse than the
one before.

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Mike said...

Posted on May 02 2008 10:34 Ever put something together and it actually worked; Iron Man gives you that feeling - it's inspiring in a lot of ways!

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daniel said...

Posted on May 01 2008 12:47 i have seen movies but, this one is and exeptionet and fantasic movie and its like no other!

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bob said...

Posted on May 01 2008 12:44 it is an exciting movie.

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