Movie Review: Iron Man

Before I get into it, let’s all be clear.  Iron Man is not supposed to be a high minded film about life.  Its a CG eye-candy action flick.  Now that I have that out of the way, this movie was great.  Its one I wanted to see in the theater, and I was finally able to go see it with some friends last night.

There isn’t a great deal to say about the plot, because, for the most part, that’s not what these kinds of movies are about.  I’m also not familiar with the Iron Man comics, so I can’t speak to how closely it stayed true to the story line or tone of the comic.  I’ll say that the plot line and character development was sufficient enough for me to really enjoy the movie.

I thought the special effects and action sequences were pretty sweet.  The special/visual effects artists did a great job with the suit and some of the detail they went in to to making the suit look cool while also bringing in some realism, which usually isn’t needed for comic book based movies.  As far as I could tell, it was a good representation of the original and they did some really cool stuff with how the suit worked and how the suit operated during flight to help him stabilize himself in the air.

The music for the movie was excellent.  The score is very guitar heavy in most cases with AC/DC’s Back in Black and Black Sabbath’s Iron Man being prominent.  One little funny thing is that I have Back in Black as the ringer on my cell phone and in a very Pavlovian way, when the song came on the movie I started to reach for my cell phone.  Yeah, I’m a dork.  There was also some input from Rage Against the Machine guitarist Tom Morello.  I initially thought the Rage music was one of their tracks, but trying to figure out which one today, it appears it may have been an original contribution from Morello.

I thought Robert Downey, Jr. did a good job in the lead role.  He’s a pseudo-lovable, arrogant playboy selling arms to start the movie.  After his mindset changing moment, he realizes that his efforts to make the world safer by producing weapons has backfired because his weapons are ending up in the hands of the bad guys.  He decides to change the direction of his life, but he doesn’t lose all of his reckless cockiness.  He has softened a little bit, but he still prefers a little bit of a “ready, shoot, aim” mentality that I think makes him a little more believable.

Really only two negatives from the movie.  Gwyneth Paltrow seemed a bit awkward in her role.  I think the character was supposed to be a little awkward, but it looked like she was trying to be awkward at times, which made her awkwardly awkward.  Not terrible, but not her best performance.  And my only real “I call BS” moment from the movie came after he pieced together his first suit.  He builds this suit from a bunch of scraps that he has in a cave out in the middle of nowhere Afghanistan, and somehow he find enough flamethrower fuel to burn down the entire extremist camp during his escape.  Having a hard time believing that.

If you like action flicks or comic book based movies, this one is definitely a watch.  I’d rank this as better than the last two Spiderman movies (can’t remember the first well enough to compare), but not as good as Batman Begins.  If you haven’t seen it and can find it in the theater, I would definitely recommend trying to catch it on the big screen.  If you can’t find it, definitely rent it when it comes out.