Cinema Review: Iron Man

The latest jaunt from the Marvel universe is certainly a well built affair. It features a good combination of action and yakking and contains some very strong performances - not least from it’s leads, Robert Downey Jr. and Gwyneth Paltrow. The script is a step above the norm with a central character that does not suffer from a case of the ‘overly righteous’ bug that seems to infect these people. In fact, I would go so far as to say that Iron Man is definitely one of the better Marvel efforts (i.e. a lot closer to Blade than Spiderman 3)… only problem is that for two hours I was bored to tears.

Insanely bored.

Chairman of the Bored.

Everyone around me was having fun and enjoying the movie, I was thinking about how weird my trainers looked at a certain angle - I can’t explain it. The film certainly has it’s weak points and I definitely don’t like the way it pandered to my liberal hypocrisies in booing militarism whilst applauding a man in a metal suit beating the crap out of people (we all know superheroes should be right-wingers and not finger waggers), but none of that has stopped me from enjoying this sort of film before.

Maybe it’s because the variety of superhero origin movies is actually quite limited, we all know that with great power comes great yadda yadda yadda and so on. Maybe it’s because following the excellent Batman Begins makes the others just look a bit second rate. Maybe the time afforded to story development in Heroes has ruined all this?

I really wanted to like this film and I can see why everyone else (and I mean everyone) did and, like E.T., I know that Iron Man is a good film, I just couldn’t care less about it.

5/10

p.s. stick around until the credits have finished

cast & crew info

trailer