What a disappointment.

Rating: 2/10 (19 December 2008)

Spoilers: Now I have to tell you up front, I had never heard of the Ironman character until this movie came out. But the word everywhere was that this was one of the best superhero movies to date so not being a theater goer, I eagerly anticipated it's release on DVD. What I saw was horrible. Yes there were some cool scenes of him flying around in the suit, most of which I had already seen on Ebert & Roper. I'll admit, this concept had potential, but the plot was horrendous.
First of all, I for one, am truly sick to death of hearing about Bush's wars in the middle east and setting most of the movie in Afganistan was a horrible idea. I go to such fantasy movies to escape reality, not be reminded of national tragedy. Besides in superhero movies the villains are supposed to be larger than life. This is about as cheesy as the old comics from the 40's showing Superman fighting Tojo, etc. Setting this in Afganistan very much dates this movie and as current events subside, this movie will become unwatchable in a generation. Imagine if Tim Burton's Batman was about not Batman confronting the Joker, but Batman taking on Manuel Norriega, the victim of the regimes propaganda machine at the time. No one would watch it today, fortunately Tim Burton knew better than to give us such trash.
Another thing that didn't work for me was the flipping back and forth in time. This is confusing, even in a show I like such as NBC's HEROES. I'm not too fond of this technique and wish it were kept to an absolute minimum. And where it works is where the jump is a foreshadow of the very ending like Lawrence of Arabia, or Fight Club. This movie started out with a random scene from the middle of the movie. The chronological storytelling in Spiderman would have been much better here, especially as Ironman isn't as well known to the public as the Superman, Spiderman, or Batman characters.
But the most truly dreadful scene that caused this movie to jump the shark in my opinion was were he invented the Ironman suit as a hostage in a cave. This was so utterly ridiculous, the most sophisticated technology yet created by man in a medieval lockup. The creation of the second suit in the lab I could see, and I wish that point is where this movie began and they rewrote the whole script without the Islamic terrorist crap. On the bright side I did like Robert Downey Jr's work in here and also though Jeff Bridges did a decent job with his new creepy look. But all in all this was a waste of a DVD rental fee and I now have little faith in the taste of all these teenage video game nerds.