Don’t know about you, but if I’d recently tangled with gadzillions
of unfriendly extra-terrestrials, and flown through a worm-hole to dispose of
an inconvenient nuclear missile, and almost crash-landed in the middle of
Manhattan before being snatched and saved in mid-air by The Incredible Hulk –
and did all those things while worrying whether the electromagnetic dingus
secured on my chest would continue working properly, and keep bits and pieces
of shrapnel from piercing my heart – I think I might find myself prone to
anxiety attacks for weeks, if not decades, afterwards.
Which is one of the reasons why, right from the get-go, I had an unreasonably good time with
Iron Man 3,
the first big blast of the summer movie season. As Tony Stark, the super-rich,
ultra-cool brainiac inside the red-and-gold Iron Man armor, Robert Downey Jr. usually
comes across as almost arrogantly insouciant and unflappable -- the snarkiest
hipster ever to do derring-do in a comic-book movie. So it’s a nifty change of
pace – and, yes, an effectively humanizing touch – for Downey to appear beset
by spasms of post-traumatic stress during the first several minutes of this
new movie while Stark recovers from all the sound and fury (and the demands of
S.H.I.E.LD. boss Nick Fury) that defined
The
Avengers.
Of course, you can’t keep or a good man – or, to use Stark’s
own self-deprecating phrase, a man in a can – down for very long. But even after
Stark shakes off the funk and gets into gear,
Iron Man 3 indicates that everyone involved in this sequel wanted to
add a few new pages to the playbook, or at least take a couple detours while
covering familiar ground.
Stark actually spends long stretches of the flick outside of
his armor while tracking down The Mandarin (Ben Kingsley), a fearsome international
terrorist who evidently took grooming tips from Osama Bin Laden, and Aldrich
Killian (Guy Pearce), a brilliant scientist whose bad intentions are so obvious
– even during the opening scenes, set in 1999, when he’s supposed to be a needy
and nerdy Stark worshipper – that I feel entirely safe in announcing without a spoiler alert that, yeah, he’s no damn good.
Iron Man 3 often
has the pleasurably anything-goes air of a '70s James Bond movie as Tony
Stark goes globe-trotting after clues and connections, all the while dressed in
civilian attire, and even karate-chops a bit-player or two. (The 007 flavor is
enhanced at the very end with a wink-wink on-screen promise: “Tony Stark will
return…”) Indeed, like Bond, Stark relies on his wits as much as he utilizes
gadgetry. For a while, at least.
And then… well, hey, this
is an Iron Man movie, right?
The plot has something to with a limb-regenerating therapy
that has rather unfortunate side-effects – some human guinea pigs turn into incendiary
bombs and/or villainous variations of
The Human Torch – and something else to
do with a beautiful research scientist (Rebecca Hall) who may not be entirely
unhappy about how her breakthroughs are ruthlessly exploited.
There’s an audaciously ingenious plot twist at the midway
point that may shock and upset those who view Marvel Comics mythos as sacrosanct
– and, come to think of it, might also additionally peeve people already queasy
about the use of terrorist mayhem as a comic-book movie plot device. But it will
greatly amuse just about everyone else. (More than that, alas, I cannot tell
you.)
And there’s a very welcome and largely successful effort on
the part of director and co-scriptwriter Shane Black (
Kiss Kiss Bang Bang) to elevate the relationship between Stark and
gal pal Pepper Potts (Gwyneth Paltrow, a.k.a.
The
World’s Most Beautiful Woman) to the level of a compellingly passionate
romance. (Jon Favreau, director of the first two Iron Man adventures, has stuck
around to continue playing Happy Hogan, Stark’s bodyguard.) It also helps, by
the way, that Pepper gets more actively involved in the action this time around,
and Paltrow is more than up to the challenge.
The pacing is appropriately propulsive, the action sequences
– especially Iron Man’s rescue of passengers rudely ejected from Air Force One,
and a climactic confrontation involving mammoth explosions, massive destruction
and an entire posse of Iron Man suits – are satisfyingly rousing, and the comic
relief is frequently and refreshingly laugh-out-loud funny.
Granted, the narrative logic is something less than
watertight, and a few plot developments are, at best, fuzzily finessed. To be honest, I’m
still trying to figure out why Don Cheadle’s
War Machine – here rechristened
Iron Patriot, and tricked out with a red-and-white-and-blue paint job – is so
easily immobilized without doing lasting damage to his high-tech hardware.
But
never mind. Truth to tell, I sometimes have a hard time with the narrative
logic (or the lack thereof) in James Bond movies, too. And that’s never gotten
in the way of my having a good time – most of the time – with
that franchise.
With Downey cracking wise in his trademark fashion while fighting
the good fights, Paltrow and Kingsley at the forefront of a first-rate supporting
cast, and a whole mess of stuff blowing up real good,
Iron Man 3 is a super-sized comic-book epic that’s licensed to
thrill.
And yes, you should stick around until after the closing
credits.
Todd McCarthy of Variety