Iron Man

Went to see Iron Man the other weekend. Genuinely, I was not sure what to make of it. Movies based on Marvel heroes range from superb, to mediocre, to “I would rather pluck out my eyeballs and burn them to tattered shreds in battery acid than watch that film again” bad. Iron Man had the potential to fit into any of those categories.

And so much of the film was shit. Robert Downey Jr played Tony Stark very well; mainly because Stark is an arrogant, playboy dick and you can imagine playing that role is not that much of a stretch for Robert Downey Jr. The action sequences are not so much typical superhero fights as examples of weapon porn; not least the last, climatic fight, which is basically “I’ve got a bigger suit that you have” willy waving. Finally, the politics of the film at screwed up to say the least. It seems to suggest that Middle Eastern terrorists are bad. Really bad. They’ll shoot you in the chest and kill your cell mate/new found best bud. But they are nowhere near as bad as big, fat American businessmen. Because not only are they paying those Middle Eastern terrorists to try to kill you, they will also come along and effectively steal your heart from your chest, before fighting you to the stars and back. Thank Christ for those drunken, flippant and arrogant millionaire playboys. They are the real heroes.

Yet, despite the oodles of shite in this film, it works. Seriously, it all comes together and works really well. It is mindless pap that makes you feel you have lost a couple of IQ points over the course of viewing the film, but at least it is enjoyable. You come out feeling entertained, and that you have seen a proper, old fashioned blockbuster. The film feels like a comic book on the big screen, and works because of that.

And that, surely, should be the point of a comic book adaptation; to be fun and be entertaining. Yeah, with a Batman film you can go a bit darker – it is basically about a guy with post-traumatic stress disorder. However, if you try to ground Superman in the real world, the result is just deeply boring. Likewise, the Hulk should be going “Hulk smash!”, not “Hulk psychoanalyse self whilst fighting unconvincing CGI Hulk dogs.” Also, if you want to make a comic book film about revenge and the darkness within even the minds of heroes, you need to spend a bit more time getting the people to care about those heroes. Otherwise you end up with the emotionally flaccid Daredevil.

Iron Man shows the way to go with almost all superhero movies: make them big, populist blockbusters. Because telling big, populist stories is how the source materials became popular enough to make them into blockbusters in the first place.