Not too bad, not too good

Rating: 10/10 (11 May 2008)

Iron Man was an okay movie. I went twice, and I'm thinking about going in for a third viewing. But I'm sorta disappointed, because I am a comics collector and I know how great a potential the character has. What we were given here - and I might be able to forgive Hollywood for it, but Marvel Studios? - was a movie where the acting worked very well, and things looked good, but the plot and story were mediocre at best. The origin story was too long and not "important" enough - I mean, why would this terrorist guy make Tony Stark build him a Jericho missile when he already had several of them (we *see him using them* later in the movie)? Just to get one more? And that's the whole setting for the situation that creates Iron Man? I'm sorry, but that's effin' thin. No points for cleverness there. The visual effects were very good, but I say again that the story was too thin. Too many scenes were too predictable, incl. much of the end. And though the acting was good, the characters had little depth, especially Stane. It's cool enough that they used the Iron Monger story from Iron Man #200 (which came out in 1985 and was the culmination of a long story arc), but it would have been much cooler if they'd introduced Stane as Stark's partner and waited until the second or third movie to have him come out of the closet as a villain. And now that terrorist guy (who's supposed to be The Mandarin, Iron Man's arch-nemesis) is apparently going to build an army of Iron Men, or something like that, for the next movie, making the villains in that one armored as well. Can we please stop filling up Iron Man movies with Iron Man knock-offs? God knows there're enough of them in the comics. At least pick the more interesting ones, like the Mandroids or the Guardsmen.
Actingwise, the news is almost all good. Downey Jr. performs to near-perfection and is very believable. Most of the cast is very good, right down to the guy playing Agent Coulson. I only have two gripes, one small and one bigger. The smaller is that Gwyneth Paltrow is a bit wasted on too small a role. Sure, it's an important role, and she plays it superbly, but... I don't know, I just think there should be a bit more to her role than this. More screen time, certainly. Well, maybe in the next movie. The bigger gripe is the only one of the actors who doesn't work for me at all: the guy playing James Rhodes. He's not right. He's not the cool, no-nonsense, hands-on, likable, masculine, pilot grunt that he is in the comics. His own man, a Han Solo-like scoundrel and ladies' man. Oh no, in the movie he's a big-time establishment stooge; a member of the weapons-industrial complex, a typical narrow-minded army man, speaking in an ever so slightly nasal voice. And I hate to pull the color card, but he's not as dark as he is in the comics. Why are Black comics characters always lighter - or should that be whiter - in the movie versions (cf. Storm in X-Men)? Well, what they've done, character-wise, is to turn Rhodey into the War Machine character from the horrifically bad '90s run, where he had a (never satisfactorily explained) falling out with Stark and got his own comic book. So the movie Rhodey is that guy; a weapons freak whose personality is inconsistent with the one he had in the far superior '80s stories. Nobody's got Zagnut anymore...
So you see, there are things to complain about here. That Marvel Studios have focused more on the actors than the substance of the story shows you how much they care about the comics: about zilch. They just want to do a commercially successful movie. Make money. Bah! They're as evil as the cigarette manufacturers Ezekiel Stane blew away in Invincible Iron Man #1! Ha! :-)
Anyway. Entertaining movie, if rather short of perfect. But enough for a 8 rating. The next one will probably be better. Against the odds, I remain optimistic. It's the only way to live!