Robert Downey, Jr. is a funny
guy. We all know that, right? I don’t mean just as the characters he plays
– you’ve seen him do press or talk shows when he’s promoting something, and
he’s obviously as sharp as a tack. We’ve
also all seen the other two Iron Man
pictures, as well as The Avengers,
and it’s fairly apparent that the wise-ass genius Tony Stark was the role
he was born to play. The snarky,
rapid-fire dialogue which comes so easily to Downey was the highlight of his
three previous portrayals of the character (well, four, if you include his
post-credits scene in The Incredible
Hulk). The question I have after
seeing Iron Man 3, however, is
at what point does a highlight start to blind us?
Shane Black, the screenwriter who
created Riggs & Murtaugh in Lethal
Weapon, and wrote and directed the criminally-underappreciated Kiss, Kiss, Bang, Bang (also
starring Downey), assumes the director’s chair for this entry of the series
from Jon Favreau (who thankfully still found time to return and play Stark’s
bodyguard Happy Hogan). He and his
co-writer Drew Pearce give us a story of how Stark is adjusting to his world
after being so emotionally scarred by his experiences in The Avengers, suffering from anxiety and insomnia, and
driving him to focus obsessively on his various suits of armor, which puts
strain on his relationship with Pepper Potts (Gwyneth Paltrow). Along comes the terrorist threat known as The
Mandarin (Ben Kingsley), as well as some professional acquaintances from
Stark’s past conveniently reentering his life, namely one Aldrich Killian (Guy
Pearce), and the resulting death and destruction drive him to learn just what
his priorities really should be.
Iron Man 3 is a lot of fun and fits in the series very well. It feels like we’re seeing the same
characters in the same world we’ve observed before, and it’s definitely the
most frenetic of the three movies. The
action pieces of the film, of which there are several, are spectacular. We’ve all seen the destruction of Stark’s
mansion in the trailers and TV spots, so it’s not a spoiler to say that if you
thought that was impressive, there are others just as good before movie’s end. Stark spends a great deal of the time outside
his armor, even during battle, and this new story-wrinkle leads to a whole lot
more techno-cacophony. If anything,
Black gets a little carried away with the mayhem at the movie’s conclusion, but
Hell, if you buy a ticket to a superhero movie (or a Shane Black movie, for
that matter) without expecting lots and lots of Stuff-Blown-Up-Good, then you’d
best do a better job of researching how to spend your entertainment dollar.
Black tries to take us a little
deeper into everybody’s psyche than the previous movies did. Stark has so much of his world upended during
this movie that he has to seriously reexamine just what being Iron Man means to
him, and how it impacts the people around him.
He spends a large portion of the movie out of his armor, being forced to
come to grips with his emotional distress and to rely on his wits, and not his
inventions. Black excels at writing the
sort of dialogue that Downey excels at delivering, and he has provided a
different tone for the series, but while the concept of Stark’s introspection
is very interesting, I think Black misfires in the execution in a few
ways.
Sure, it would be foolish to attempt
making this film without taking advantage of Downey’s wit, but there are some
instances in Iron Man 3 where
the old adage of Less-being-More is ignored.
Stark’s mouth is pretty much running constantly throughout the movie,
yapping off at each and every character he encounters, regardless of the
logic. The addition of an
almost-stereotypical “kid sidekick” was a bitter disappointment, and seemed to
primarily be A) a means to provide Stark a target for some rapid-fire smart-ass-ness,
and B) a marketing ploy to involve kids who are probably too young to be seeing
this PG-13/borderline-R movie in the first place.
As good a job as Black does at
delving deeper into Stark, he does it at the expense of the other characters
around him. The Killian and Maya Hansen
characters are woefully underdeveloped, and the Hansen character in particular
is almost dumped from the film about two-thirds of the way through. As much fun as Don Cheadle’s Rhodey/Iron
Patriot may be in the movie's final act, even his inclusion felt wedged in
there, in a story-logic sort of way.
Iron Man 3 is a worthy entry in the series, and I enjoyed it enough that I look
forward to the character’s return in The
Avengers 2 in a couple of years, but as good a movie as it is, I can
see how it could have been even better. I
liked how we delved deeper into Stark’s relationship with Pepper and his
overall mindset after his experiences in The
Avengers, but while Stark so famously said “I am Iron Man” at the
conclusion of the first film, and he does come to learn more about what that
phrase means to him by the end of this movie, I’m left wanting to learn a few
more things. But, hey - we sure got a
lot of great one-liners…
No comments:
Post a Comment