Stars: Robert Downey Jr., Gwyneth Paltrow, Don Cheadle, Guy Pearce, Rebecca Hall, Jon Favreau, Ben Kingsley
Director: Shane Black
Oscar History: 1 nomination (Best Visual Effects)
Snap Judgment Ranking: 3/5 stars
It's been going on for several years, but I'm still trying to get my head around the Marvel universe that Disney has wrought, and in particular, what it means for the franchises as a whole. While the Avengers are the biggest things on the planet right now, what's going to happen to these characters when the actors that play them decide they've had enough (it's hard to fathom RDJ ever wanting to give up the Fort Knox he's found in this franchise, but actors tend to move on, and they get older). Are we in a Doctor Who/James Bond sort of situation where the characters stay but the actors alternate, or is this simply a brief moment where the Marvel universe runs the world, and then it passes into oblivion for another twenty years in a way similar to the Superman franchise? We shall see...In the meantime, my complicated feelings about the franchise don't just revolve around the eventual future of the series, but what the series means for the cinema. There have been a lot of series in the past few years that have wanted to transform more into a television-style approach to their stories-multiple, sometimes endless tales that relate to each other, with the next chapter just around the corner, and occasionally spreading the films a little thin (Twilight, Harry Potter, Hunger Games, Lord of the Rings, Pixar, and even oddly The Hangover films all seem to fall into this unnecessarily long series mode). No one has quite done it in the same fashion as The Avengers, however. Not only have we received the phenomenally successful Joss Whedon film, but we also have individual outings from Iron Man, Thor, and Captain America (you have to feel a little bit bad for Black Widow, Hawkeye, and Mark Ruffalo's Hulk that they don't have the same sort of solo series cache). These films all work on their own merit, but they also rely heavily on each other, and to miss one means to be left out of the inside jokes on a future film. I'll admit that I like this better than the stretches that Twilight, for example, took with their source material when it wasn't necessary to make a fifth film-it seems more in-tuned with the core comic book mentality, where superheroes regularly visit each other (they live in the same world, after all), and yet also have their own adventures. This true-to-the-source approach is, however, having a serious impact on my pocketbook.
But I digress, and should be getting to the film at hand. While we last left Iron Man in the successful mission in New York City, the last time we left Tony Stark by his lonesome, I have to say I left the film quite disappointed. The heavy-handed attitude of Iron Man 2 was out-of-character both for RDJ as well as for the approach filmmakers have taken for the Marvel franchises (this sort of self-reflexive, brooding attitude is more at home in the DC Universe). This film, thankfully, got a lot more fun out of its superhero, and as a result felt fuller and more at-home stylistically.
(Spoilers throughout) Tony Stark, of course, does still have issues from his time in New York, PTSD that has developed as a result of his fighting off Loki and his band of evildoers, but that's more of a plot device than a plot driver, and we get to see him gamely flirting with anything that moves, and of course challenging bad guys and floating through the air cockily (or arrogantly, depending on your Downey tolerance level), and having a damn good time doing it. Stark slowly starts to rebuild his post-Avengers lifestyle, and while PTSD is what he attributes it to, part of me sort of wonders if he is jonesing for the high of working with the Avengers again, wanting to return to that universe once more. I felt as the film ended, at least, that this was what the writers were hinting toward (depending on how many Greek islands it's going to cost to keep Downey in the picture).
The film also has two villains, and one disappointment on that front. Guy Pearce plays Aldrich Killian, who is a nerdy scientist who develops, along with his assistant, Maya (Hall) a virus that makes the user regenerate their own body parts and become practically invincible. For a part of the film, you're sort of wondering why the movie isn't focusing on the clear villain, the iconic Mandarin from the comic books (played by Ben Kingsley), but slowly you realize that the Mandarin himself is nothing but a front, and the true mastermind of the evil plots is Pearce. The Mandarin is just an actor playing the part of a terrorist, which makes for some hilarious scenes with Kingsley, though I'm a bit disappointed that they took the teeth out of such an important Marvel villain.
The film's battle sequences are epic, and though nothing quite hits the heights reached by The Avengers, this movie comes close with the great sequence destroying Tony Stark's house. The movie never really takes a breather, but it feels well-paced. I could have done without the heavy-handed lusting of Killian after Pepper Potts in one of the early scenes (couldn't just once we not have the villain and the hero falling for the same girl?), but the women in the film are actually relatively interesting, as opposed to some of the other Marvel movies. A lot can be said about how well-cast Downey is as Tony Stark, but Paltrow is pitch-perfect as his gutsy, level-headed girlfriend/assistant/CEO. Paltrow's gift has always been more in comedy than in drama (where she tends to get a bit melodramatic), and she effervesces in the film without ever lulling into a Mary Jane Watson teen-girl fantasizing. Hall was also strong in her role as Maya, though even those who weren't familiar with her character from the comic books could smell that she was the "good-girl-masquerading-as-bad" a mile away.
The film's final scenes got too long (how many times can Stark or Killian come back from the dead?), and occasionally Stark's lack of humility wears thin (the trite scenes with the boy in the small Tennessee town were a bit saccharine for me), but overall this was Summer blockbuster fun without veering into too effects-driven or plot-deprived. However, I'd love to know what you thought? Do you like the direction Marvel is taking this franchise? Do you also wish that they'd throw in a female-lead action adventure, rather than just giving the solos to the boys? And should Iron Man remain a trilogy or should a fourth film be greenlit as soon as possible?
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