..Gary Dretzka
..Noah Forrest
..Leonard Klady
..David Poland
..Douglas Pratt
..Ray Pride
..Michael Wilmington

Iron Man,
And Son of Rambow, Flight of The Red Balloon
Plus Ratings Of This Week's DVDs

Iron Man (Three Stars)
U.S.; Jon Favreau

Casting Robert Downey Jr. as the beleaguered superhero of a Marvel Comics spectacular -- in a big, expensive movie based on Stan Lee’s early tales of crime-fighting Iron Man -- may seem like a nutty or even potentially disastrous decision. Isn’t this the kind of heavily costumed superhero film assignment that could drive an actor to drink or drugs?

Downey though makes his Iron Man director (Jon Favreau) and producers (Kevin Feige and Avi Arad) look like geniuses. He gives his part of Tony Stark -- the whiz inventor-mega-billionaire who converts himself into the clanking crusader Iron Man -- a wit, passion, intensity and irony that light up the whole movie.

(Editor's Note: There are a lot of spoilers spread throughout the next nine paragraphs of the review.)

It’s a brilliant job, in a role that certainly doesn’t seem as if it called for brilliance -- or anything much beyond remembering the lines and staying out of range of the special effects. Just how good can an actor be when the major tasks of his role require him to be hidden (or faking it) inside a huge flame-throwing, flying robot uniform, while duking it out with (spoiler alert, I guess) another flying, flame-throwing robot supposedly containing another Jeff Bridges?

Yet Downey is both incredibly good and amazingly right in this part -- and so are his sometimes equally improbable-sounding cast-mates: Bridges as the genial corporate killer Obadiah Stane, Gwyneth Paltrow as Tony’s gorgeous Girl Friday Pepper Potts, and Terrence Howard as trusty Pentagon sidekick Rhodey. This is the kind of dream ensemble that, before the 1978 Superman, you’d never expect in a comic book movie: the kind of actors you want to see in the best, most challenging parts and the most ambitious pictures.

And, with one small exception, Iron Man never seems to be wasting their time. Or ours. They all click. There’s even a wonderful performance in a small part by a lesser known actor who really impressed me: Shaun Toub as Yinsen, the brainy, bespectacled fellow prisoner in the Afghanistan Taliban cavern prison where Tony is held in the movie’s first sections, and where the abducted inventor designs and builds the first Iron Man suit. Toub almost makes you cry in his last scene -- which should give you an idea of the heavier emotional tone and weight this movie often carries.

Back when I was a regular reader of Marvel Comics -- and it seems like almost everyone was a Marvel fan at one time or another -- I never ran across “Iron Man.” (I stuck mostly to Spidey.) But you can feel Stan Lee’s antic, wise-cracking inspiration on the story, which is all to the good. Because it’s another franchise establisher, and probably will be a very successful one, Iron Man spends a lot of time on the character’s origins, and its time well spent; the first two thirds are really the best part of the movie. (It actually loses a little in its climactic payoff battle scenes.) In an opening full of cinematic wizardry and crisp satire, we’re introduced to Tony and his world of Malibu splendor, private jets (Tony’s plane has its own go-go dancers) and high-tech toys and inventions -- and also to the future Iron Man’s friends and enemies.

Tony, like the boyish tycoon Howard Hughes, on whom he was originally based, is an unabashed war profiteer, who finds his ideological attackers ridiculous and naïve. (Example: Leslie Bibb as the blond dish of an anti-war journalist who winds up in Tony’s bed). Then he’s chastened, changed. While touring the Afghan desert to sell more product, our pre-iron lad is attacked, wounded and captured by the Taliban, whose Genghis Khan-worshipping, Osama-suggesting leader, Raza (Farin Tahir), backed by fat thug second in command Abu Bakaar (Sayed Badreya), demands that Tony make a deadly missile, after which they promise (sure, sure…) to release him.

Instead, Tony, helped by Yinsen, designs and executes the first Iron Man robot suit, a mechanical doozy that enables him to ward off gunfire, zap his foes to a crisp and take jet-propelled jaunts across the desert. A little superhero zing goes a long way. When he returns to the Stark company, Tony’s been transformed; he’s decided to stop manufacturing weapons of mass destruction and give peace a chance -- which is like Hughes suddenly abandoning aircraft.

The genial Obadiah, whom Bridges plays like the Marvel original, with a beard and chrome dome, seems to go along with this. But Tony’s actions bewilder both Rhodey and Pepper -- and fairly soon we find out that Obadiah’s acquiescence is a sham. (In a neat inside TV joke, Favreau shoots the bellowing cable TV economist Jim “Mad Money” Kramer flailing, ranting and raving about the stupidity of Tony’s peacenik transformation and new business strategy.)

The rest of the picture gives us Tony sparring with Obadiah and flirting with Pepper (who sometimes seems strangely reminiscent of Mia Farrow) and coming up with new Iron Man suits -- one a groovy metallic, the other a flashy red. The show also keeps driving Tony toward his final confrontation with Obadiah -- which we know will be one of those Marvel smart-aleck slugfests and bash-balls that always helped climax the comics.

The movie was written by two teams of writers, and one of those duos, Mark Fergus and Hawk Ostby, also scripted two fine recent neo-noirs, Alfonso Cuaron’s no-kids science fiction piece Children of Men and Fergus’ doom-soaked crime thriller First Snow. The foursome has done a good, but not extraordinary, job with this material. They‘ve preserved the original storyline but modernized and moved it from the era of the Vietnam War (when it was originally conceived) to post-9/11 times. And they’ve done a nifty little political tap-dance; their storyline exploits sentiments both gung ho (Cream those bad guys!) and leftist (The war’s a con and big money rules!).

Overall, it’s another intelligent, well-mounted Marvel job, though I thought it fell down a little at the end. There’s definitely some juice missing in the last act -- and it could have been improved by giving something meatier to Howard, perhaps playing up more of the obvious pro-war, pro-peace schisms between Rhodey and Tony. The last battle of the two Iron Men -- Obadiah in the metallic suit, Tony in the red -- is also a disappointment of sorts (not a major one): a sometimes soaring, sometimes lumbering robo-brawl. Couldn’t they have played it the way Lee’s ‘60s comics always did: with Downey and Bridges dealing out wisecracks with every slug, trading bon mots with every bop? If you have two super-actors like that, it’s best to exploit them as much as possible.

(Editor's Note: End of Spoilers)

But it doesn’t really matter. The actors and the director really elevate this story. Iron Man has all the high-tech virtuosity you’d expect, but tech triumphs by themselves can often be annoying, if the acting and writing aren’t good enough. Here, the writing is fine and the actors are much better than good. Paltrow is a honeybunch and a half, and Bridges reminds you that he could easily have been the action superstar Harrison Ford became, but that he always went for something different, and riskier, instead. For these performances and for the film’s very smart, very human feel and just-right pace, we have to thank Favreau, who does exactly what a big pop moviemaker should: He gives us what we want.

Downey really hits Iron Man up with a jolt of magic, though. His Tony is a comic book hero with soulfulness and sting. The New Yorker’s David Denby, in a mixed review, suggests Downey might actually become the first hipster movie star since Brando and Mitchum-- a sentiment with which I agree, except that it’s a bit unfair to James Dean, Jack Nicholson and Chris Walken.

But “hipster” is the right word. Downey is able, magically, to play his roles deeply and movingly in character and also as “Robert Downey, Jr.“ a proto-hip soul who glides over even the clichés by agilely downplaying and mocking them. Downey has been quoted in IMDB as saying that he doesn’t know anything about acting, that he’s just a gifted faker. But, in fact, that very fakery is a big part of his genius, as it was of Peter Sellers’ or Zero Mostel’s -- because he always lets us in on the con. He’s both superbly masked and touchingly transparent, an iron man of glib jokes and fragile, vulnerable emotions.

SON OF RAMBOW (Two and a half stars)
U.K.; Garth Jennings

A nice little movie about two British schoolkids falling in love with Sly Stallone’s Rambo in First Blood and trying to make their own inept camcorder pastiche. I’m a little mystified at its high critical reception -- it’s better directed than written (both by Jennings -- but maybe I’m a cynic. And maybe I’m remembering Rambo: First Blood, Part 2.


FLIGHT OF THE RED BALLOON (Three stars)
France; Hou Hsiao-hsien

This one was just out, and it may be holding on in art-houses, just as Lamorisse’s beautiful original 1956 Red Balloon comes out as a Criterion DVD. (See below.) You should see both: Red Balloon because it’s a pure, lilting kid’s masterpiece and “Flight of the Red Balloon because it’s one great filmmaker’s homage to another -- though the story, with Juliette Binoche as a troubled mother, eschews the fantastical. There‘s a balloon here, but it‘s no whimsical pet and martyr. It’s just a kibitzer on Hou‘s long takes.


MW on DVD

NEW RELEASE

The Diving Bell and the Butterfly (Three and a half stars)
France; Julian Schnabel, 2007 (Miramax)

CLASSIC RELEASES

The Red Balloon (Four stars)
France; Alert Lamorisse, 1956 (Criterion Collection)

White Mane (Four stars)
France; Albert Lamorisse, 1953 (Criterion Collection)

BOX SETS (Already in release)

The Adventures of Young Indiana Jones (10 discs) (Three stars)
U.S.; Various directors, 1992 (Paramount)

Midsomer Murders: The Early Cases (19 discs) (Three and a half stars)
U.K.; Various directors; 1997-9 (Acorn Media)

OTHER RECOMMENDATIONS

The Fall of the Roman Empire (Three and a half stars)
U.S.; Anthony Mann, 1964 (Genius Products/The Weinstein Company)

Saludos Amigos/The Three Caballeros (Three and a half`stars)
U.S.; Various directors, 1943, 1945 (Walt Disney)

Paddle to the Sea (Three and a half stars)
Canada; Bill Mason, 1966 (Criterion Collection)

- Michael Wilmington
May 1, 2008

April 24: Tuya's Marriage, Chapter 27
April 17: My Blueberry Nights
April 10: Shine A Light, Plus Young @ Heart, Smart People, and The Forbidden Kingdom

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