Iron Man 2

The more Slothy gnaws on this the more it becomes clear that this kind of film is what is least nutritious about movies. That is doesn’t hold together in terms of plot, or that the action sequences are middling and only sometimes cool ends up beside the other point, which is that a good movie will, if it fails at the other things, will at least get us thinking about some of the issues it raises.

But if part of Iron Man’s schtick is that he’s turned being a super-hero into a non-anonymous capitalistic venture, a corporation, then we’d like to find out about the effects of this privatization on good-samaritanism; why is this fellow a super-hero, in other words? But instead we get replicas of the Iron Man outfit––many replicas, in many permutations––and, worse, the charisma of Robert Downey Jr. is implausibly wasted; we might see his face, but the things that make him human are mostly and deliberately withheld from us and from his own character. Scarlett Johanson, for example, doing ninja acrobatics does not help us make sense of Iron Man’s frat-boy impulses in the context of his simultaneous responsibility to uphold world peace.

I was ready to give this an A despite what the critics thought; I wanted to see it as a metaphor for a metaphor of technology gone ape-shit; instead it was an action movie with very little control or power of the metaphors it was wielding every which way but smart.

And like I’ve said before, any movie that starts in Moscow for no good reason is in tremendously poor shape. The difficulties of technology are many; the complexities of using it to better the quality of human life are astounding; Iron Man, alas, is no more than the cliché of an angry Russian drinking vodka out of a bottle. C-

Koko: It still sounds better than Lifeboat.

Posted via email from Slothrop does 2010