***WARNING: There might be spoilers in this post. The movie is from 2008, so I'm assuming if you wanted to see it, you would have seen it by now.***
Last week, I blogged about having the choice between two movies and I didn't love the one I picked. The next night I decided to watch the one I hadn't picked. Iron Man starring Robert Downey Jr.
I like Robert Downey Jr. in general and that he overcame addiction to become hugely successful in Hollywood, so I had some decent hopes for this superhero movie. If you're not a frequent reader of this blog, you might not know that I'm not a fan of superhero movies and largely give them a wide berth. Because of this, I did not go into this film expecting to love it. I figured if it kept me entertained for a couple of hours, that was all I could ask.
The plot of the movie is basically that Tony Stark (Downey) is the genius owner of an arms manufacturer, and on a trip to the Middle East, he is taken hostage. He builds a metal suit and escapes. He sees that his company's weapons are being used for evil and is determined to cease production of them. His second-in-command doesn't agree with this. Oh, and Stark rebuilds his Iron Man suit, making it even better than what he cobbled together in the desert.
Pretty typical fare for a superhero movie. Simplistic villain who was obvious from the beginning and a basic good versus evil plot.
That said, Downey has enough charisma to carry this movie and make it watchable. I did sit through to the very end and liked it well enough that I'll watch Iron Man 2 when it either becomes part of Amazon Prime free streaming or makes it to Netflix. I didn't like it well enough to pay for another installment. :-)
I didn't enjoy all the setup to Stark creating the Iron Man persona, but once he became Iron Man, the film became a lot more fun for me. If I'd been the writer, I probably would have started with him already being Iron Man and then dribble the setup into the story, but I'm a novelist, not a film writer and maybe there was no good way to do that in a script? I also would have preferred a bit more complexity to the villain or at least for Stark to have realized what this guy was capable of long before the start of the film. It was so obvious and Stark is supposed to be a genius. Maybe too self-involved to pay attention?
Anyway, it was an enjoyable enough movie, and with the setup out of the way, I'm hoping the second installment will be more to my liking. I'm giving this 3 stars out of 5 with the caveat that I seriously am not a fan of superhero movies.
