So I went to see Iron Man on Monday night. I went into it with, in all honesty, limited expectations. A few months ago I was so excited about this movie I thought I might quite literally explode. I didn't, and the more I saw of this movie the less excited I was about it. I tend to do that with movies.
While I expected a watchable but ultimately mediocre telling of an Iron Man story, that is not at all what was delivered. They fooled me, those sons of bitches fooled me. This is, as far as I'm concerned, the best comic book movie ever made. If this is how Marvel studios plans to handle their films then that is alright with me.
On the surface it's simple enough. A slight update to the Iron Man origin, this one taking place in Afghanistan, was not nearly as distracting as I thought it might be. From there on out you have a lot of Tony Stark developing his Iron Man technology and drinking. Oh and also screwing beautiful women.
This movie was quite daring though. It is almost 45 minutes into the film before you see Iron Man. That's right, no costume at all for 45 minutes. This is unheard of in a comic book movie. What they did in those 45 minutes is where the genius is. They did something else practically unheard of in a comic book film, they developed the Stark character and make you care about him for reasons other than the fact that he's Iron Man. They gave us Tony Stark, the supercool billionaire that you could imagine having a few drinks with and hanging out. They gave us Tony Stark, the guy who has more notches on his bedpost than you would ever have if you lived a million years, but he still unresolved feelings for Pepper that hint at a longing for normalcy and stability. This isn't just a guy with a badass suit that hand's villains their hats. No sir. This is a guy with feelings and emotions who likes to have fun and live life to its fullest. And before you start with telling me all about the emotional struggle that Batman has to deal with, please understand the difference here. Batman has 2 emotions, anger and sadness. He's an emo kid with all the cool toys. Iron Man is a much more richly crafted character when it comes to depth of the emotional spectrum. You kind of get the impression that half the reason he continued to enhance the Iron Man armor was because flying around in it was fun. Yeah sure you can use it to save the world but flying is awesome, and chicks dig it.
The truth is, the ultimate showdown with the evil villain in this movie was the least interesting part. Don't get me wrong it was visually appealing and fun but I liked everything else in the movie so much better. I kind of thought, "Ok get this out of the way and let's have more Tony Stark".
And I don't care what certain people on the blog say, Jeff Bridges was really good. I thought he did a good job of playing both sides of his character's treacherous coin. He was Tony's best confidant and was very believable. He was also the guy that wouldn't let anything get in the way of his quest for power, including Tony Stark. Excellent work Mr. Bridges.
All in all I thought Jon Favreau did a great job of giving us a story that was interesting and was deep and richly layered. Anyone can give you a superhero movie that just has a lot of explosions and fight scenes in it. Few have even tried to give you one that has emotion and character development, and none have succeeded like this one did.
