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 Who pretended to know something about comics? Go on, stand up; don’t be shy. For every fanboy memorizing Frank Miller’s Sin City from cover to cover, or X-chick with small glasses touting Wolverine–her boyfriend–from one party to the next, hundreds of us nod blindly, going ‘hmm’ into ice tea.
Personally, I like Spiderman and graphic novels and animé and 2000AD–and feel privileged to know that Iron Man interprets a comic whose main character Tony Stark (Robert Downey Jr), a billionaire industrialist, invents an iron jumpsuit and flies off to defeat terrorists his company just sent very bad missiles to, in trucks.
Whatever the original, most cross-over heroes are so dull we’d as soon see them locked up for abusing monkeys, or for feeding us those 'family issues’ scripts the writer borrowed from a Christmas reunion, or because their unexpected twist simply isn’t. Instead of sparks you get special effects, stupid costumes, and sore cheeks.
Not so here. Director-actor Jon Favreau has everything sing, from a high-tech, glossy corporate shell to believable, funny dialogue (the actors were allowed to create their own). Downey-Junior compels as Stark, a magnate based on the life of aviator eccentric Howard Hughes. Either Favreau spent the entire film shouting "dramatic irony! psychological uncertainty!" at him, or the actor 'drew' on his much-publicized struggle with drugs: at any rate, he appears honest and engaged.
Frankly, anyone who can pull off wearing a 'generator' in a hole above their heart to prevent shrapnel from giving them a heart attack deserves to be in the most successful film of 2008.
At best, Iron Man distils a general plea–that technology should save children, not arm corporate greed–to a fantasy of personal transformation. At worst it's very unlikely, along the usual lines. I'd rather eat paint than see another confetti explosion, mindless Arab terrorist, or car waxed bright as Hasselhoff’s moustache.
Even so, as throwaway cinema, this is the happiest cross-over in years.
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