Is anyone over the age of five NOT sick of sub-par superhero movies?

Rating: 1/10 (8 December 2008)

It seems like an obsession with Hollywood to take something intentionally childish and make it "mature". You know what I'm talking about. The new Bond movies, the new Batman movies, Transformers, etc., etc. What Hollywood fails to realize is that only one out of every ten movies that follows this style actually ends up being a worthwhile movie.
Iron Man is simply one of the nine failures.
Outside of the first forty-five minutes, the entire plot line is corny and a wholesale cliché. Elaborating, Iron Man tries to be mature by mixing in the war in the middle-east. It works. That is, it works until the plot turns into the exact same plot as every other sub-par superhero movie out there. It becomes obvious by the first thirty minutes that no good person can die, and all the bad people all cackle oh-so-evilly and have no more intelligence than an average paperweight. By this point you forget the maturity of the movie's opening, and all there is to do is laugh at the impossibly cliché story. It's like watching one of the old cartoons where the good guys always win and the bad guys always have evil-looking beard stubble and talk intelligently only to be slight-handed by the more intelligent good guy. This is the "mature" superhero movie everyone told me about?
But there is a good chance you didn't watch Iron Man for the plot. You watched it for the action. The only problem with that is there is only two action scenesyes, I counted. One in the opening and one in the ending, with a few spurts of action between that last a whole thirty seconds of screen time. The first one is well-done and actually made me think this could be a decent movie. The last, however, is possibly one of the most unintentionally hilarious climactic scenes of all time. Even if I ignore the fact it's almost copy/pasted in entirety from a Mystery Science 3000 episode, some of the worst CGI used since I Am Legend ruins anything cool about it.
The space between the two action scenes is filled with some of the most cliché plotting I've seen in years, as I stated above. Put simply, there is nothing entertaining here. While Robert Downey Jr. plays his role perfectly as usual and puts on a pretty nice comedic bit every few scenes, he can't let me forget the sinking feeling in my gut that this is one of the most boring superhero movies ever made.
What more is there for me to say?
My pretentious critic conclusion: Iron Man is a severely clichéd, technically poor film with little entertainment value.
Half-drunk, adverage joe conclusion: Iron Man is boring and lame. No way is this better than The Dark Knight or Spider-Man 2!
Both are correct. Iron Man has made me personally give up all hope on the superhero genre.
0/10