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Dir. Jon Favreau
Rating: 6.6 | 0 User Reviews | Send to Friend
You certainly have to give Marvel's fledgling studio and director Jon Favreau this much: The film successfully incorporates a perfect fulcrum of the Three Holy Tiers of Geekdom: technology, comics and hot babes. Of the recent spate of superhero flicks, I would still put this a hair or two below Bryan Singer's excellent first two X-Men films, but above just about everything else. Like many other comic-based stories, this one concerns a callous man who's forced to revisit his morality. The hero's journey, in this case, starts in Afghanistan, where playboy-billionaire-weapons-industrialist (is there any other kind?) Tony Stark (Robert Downey Jr.) has just finished displaying his latest explosive wares to rave reviews. Traveling in a military motorcade, his convoy is ambushed and he is taken prisoner by nefarious -- wholly unidentified -- terrorists, who keep him prisoner in order to force him to build them one of his company's wildly successful weapons. Instead, with the help of another prisoner scientist, Yinsen (Shaun Toub), Stark builds a suit of armor powerful enough to blast his way to freedom. Back in the States, he cultivates his new sense of wisdom and orders his company to stop manufacturing weapons -- while simultaneously creating a new, far more powerful prototype armor so that he might undo some of the evil his company, led by CEO Obadiah Stane (Jeff Bridges, decidedly un-dude-like), has perpetrated through the world. As a message of peaceful optimism, the film offers a seriously mixed message -- but as an action movie with slightly more under its hard casing than expected, it's pretty kick-ass. True, it does fall into the all-too-common superhero trap -- found most glaringly in Sam Raimi's Spiderman movies -- giving short-shrift to the villain so that they never really seem like much of a threat to the hero, but never-the-less, it succeeds in a way that few films of the genre manage to accomplish: The characters are more interesting without their super costumes. Downey Jr. is, of course, a natural fit for the role of Stark, but Favreau has also lined up equally adept heavy-hitters as Gwenyth Paltrow, Bridges and Terrence Howard to balance the film's core. As would be expected of the man who penned Swingers, Favreau also shows a light touch with the humor of his scenarios, acknowledging the humor without ever giving us the wink-wink and pushing the film into parody. Speaking on behalf of comic fans the world over, we absolutely prefer our myths taken seriously.
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