Review: Iron Man (2/5)

Iron Man marks a return to the goofy manner and camp theatrics that the modern superhero film had shorn off

Iron Man
(John Favreau):
Robert Downey Jr, Terrence Howard, Gwyneth Paltrow, Jeff Bridges.
Running time: 126 minutes. HH

What makes for a good superhero? Take our champion in Iron Man. He wallows in alcohol, junks his veins with narcotics and sits out a stint in prison. He has a huge gift, yet does daily battle with the demons of insecurity and self doubt. Still, he gets up in the morning, slaps on the grin and goes to work for our benefit. Not only does Robert Downey jnr have a constitution of iron, but truly he is superhuman.
This makes him perfect for Iron Man, a film about a wealthy genius who decides to clean up his act and start doing some good for the world. But his Tony Stark has no nagging self-doubt, no moments of bottomless insecurity. And this makes for a rather dull superhero. Instead, he’s a smug genius: he runs Stark Industries, a billion-dollar arms manufacturing company; he drives fast cars; he spends his time disarming spiky female journalists and dangles them in front of his assistant Pepper (Gwyneth Paltrow) – a bland woman who looks after his every whim with motherly affection and the occasional coy glance.
Tony’s bubble is punctured (slightly) when he goes to Afghanistan to demonstrate his latest missiles system to his US military pal (Terence Howard) only to be attacked by insurgents and blown to the ground by an explosion caused by one of his own weapons. He wakes up in a dank prison with an electro-magnet in his chest and his heart wired to a car battery, and for a brief moment, I concluded this was how they’d been keeping Downey jnr alive all these years.
The baddies, a kind of hapless al Qaida-lite, want him to remake the latest Stark missile. Instead, he wires up the first Iron Man outfit – imagine MacGyver locked in a tool shed in the Tora Bora. He emerges looking like RoboCop, though later outfits are slimmed and smoothed: prototype two is toaster titanium; prototype three is slimline Ferrari red. Prototype one, however, isn’t a bad start: not only does it have a built-in flamethrower, but it appears to have a built-in beard trimmer too – when Iron Man emerges from his cave, weeks of beard have been sloughed off into fashionable goatee. He is quite the groomed superhero.
We watch him make his way across an exploding ammunition dump, licked by flames, taking bullets from all sides, and the notion strikes you: it must be insufferably hot inside all that uninsulated metal. But Tony Stark doesn’t break into a sweat. When he invents each new iron suit, he does so in a swish of keystrokes. And he does battle like the rest of us do breakfast. Later, on one of his sorties in Afghanistan, he finds himself staring down the barrel of a tank. He fires off one of his pulsar shots, an orb of light from his hand, and turns to walk away long before it connects. How’s that for boring confidence?
Superhero films of late have toiled for a new kind of interiority, but Iron Man eschews such psychology for more traditional biff-bosh action: he tussles with fighter aircraft; arm wrestles with baddy Obadiah Stone (played by Jeff Bridges, head shaven, looking not dissimilar to Ming the Merciless; he shares too some of his rampant megalomania). There’s plenty of knockabout and slapstick, allowing Downey jnr to open an armoury of hilarious tics and twitches, sliding quips out under his breath. (There is one bizarre moment when Poppy has to remove the magnetic heart from his Pringle tube-like chest, and it buzzes like a game of Operation).
Funny, though, is a thin disguise for the absence of soul, and you get out of a superhero picture what a superhero puts into it. Think of Spider-Man, and how Tobey Maguire’s Peter Parker spent the franchise unspinning himself from all that angst; while Christian Bale’s Bruce Wayne in Batman Begins took to the mountains and toiled and trained to within an inch of his life. One glance at Tony Stark and you know the only thing he struggles with is what shape to mould his goatee. Iron Man, with the psychological depth of a tin saucer, makes Batman Begins look like a work by Dostoyevsky.
The film is directed by John (Swingers) Favreau in the most functional manner, bright and shiny with zero atmosphere. (There is a moment when Iron Man flies almost effortlessly to the edge of space, but the atmosphere is thin there too.) How welcome then is Robert Downey Jr. He turns an obnoxious character into an endearing personality. He makes it look like light work, but really he is doing some heavy lifting – he is carrying the entire picture on his shoulders.
Iron Man marks a return to the goofy manner and camp theatrics that the modern superhero film had shorn off. Life here, with its thumping heavy metal soundtrack, is always a big party. But inside, Iron Man is hollow.