But this isn't Canada

[cyrano]

Herein please find my review for the new Iron Man movie.
Precis: Better than it really had any right to be.


I'm still just here for RDJr. If he's not your cup of tea, then you probably want to keep moving. He continues to be delightful, and his script writers obviously spent far too much time hanging out with him, because the things that come out of his mouth are lovely.

However, his back up band is also very good. We see very little of Gwyneth Paltrow this time around, which is unfortunate. Don Cheadle is very human, and I liked him a lot. Sam Rockwell is awesome (again) as the one bad guy who actually gets character development this time. (Hint to the writers: Russian prison tattoos are *not* character depth.) Gary Shandling brings his comic expertise along and makes what could have been a bit cameo something worth watching.

We get the Black Widow this time, and more of the trend of independent female characters who have something to do besides wait to be saved or turned into love interests. (Yes, there is kissing this time, but it didn't feel gratuitous and it didn't feel like a betrayal of what happened at the end of the first film.)

I spent most of the film going "Yay they opted against the idea of let's just make the bad guy a bigger stronger version of the hero, and at the end I was a little sad. But we still got Two Pals Fighting Crime, and the idea that Tony lets somebody in enough to play as a team.

Which brings me to backstory. I love backstory, especially when it makes sense and meshes with what we already know, informing our present with what came before. Yes, the dad thing was a little pat, but I liked it. I also really liked the plot line of "This technology you created and then didn't fully test is killing you" and the way, again, it plays into the way his character reacts to things.

Because I like *consequences*. And thus I loved the government-wants-Iron-Man plotline. For a summer blockbuster, things were played more or less intelligently, and the important part is that there was RDJr.


Coyote says: Four wags.

Comments

[ebonlock.livejournal.com]

You know, I had the same "wtf" reaction with the arc reactor-- in the first movie, when he first wakes up to find a thing in his chest, we're told that it's a strong electromagnet to pull the shrapnel away from his heart, and by the second movie I was thinking "if you can use an electromagnet to pull the shrapnel away, why can't you use an electromagnet to remove it entirely? Okay, maybe not while being held captive in a cave, but you're back home now, with all your money at your disposal."

Ok, well if we come up with a comic book answer to that question it would probably be, "It'll explode if they try to remove it" or something equally unlikely. What really puzzles me about it is that he acts like sometimes it's his replacement heart. I mean in the comic it actually *was* so that makes some sense, but is the schrapnel just moving that quickly that it could, within a few minutes, do damage to his heart? If not why does he say he's going into cardiac arrest when the generator's switched off for too long? Surely the schrapnel can't move that fast.

Sometimes I wish I could just switch my brain off and enjoy movies without higher mental functions as most viewing audiences seem to.