Of all the directors to work for Marvel Studios, Shane Black, director of Iron Man 3, had quite arguably the least enviable job of all: he had to helm the studio's first follow-up to their mega smash-hit The Avengers, and to breathe some life back into the standalone Iron Man franchise after the second installment proved to be a creative and commercial disappointment. The good news, if any of the early reviews are to be believed, is that he has hurdled both challenges with flying colors. For my part, I wholeheartedly agree with the glowing praises.
The film starts with a brief prologue set on New Year's Eve of 1999 in Bern, Switzerland, in which a decidedly unheroic Tony Stark (Robert Downey Jr.) wines and dines one scientist, his then-girlfriend Maya Hansen (Rebecca Hall) who is working on a formula to "reprogram" the human genome and makes an empty promise to another, the somewhat deformed looking Aldrich Killian (Guy Pearce) regarding the possibility of working together in his proposed think-tank. He leaves Maya in a hotel room after a one night stand, and Killian waiting for him on the roof of the same hotel. Both of these little sins will eventually come back to bite him on the butt...hard.
Back in the present, Tony should be happy. After all, he's a billionaire with a house in Malibu, a fleet of cars, a hot-CEO girlfriend, Pepper Potts (Gwyneth Paltrow), and a personal suit of flying armor. In the wake of the alien invasion that hit New York in The Avengers, though, he has been suffering from what appear to be anxiety attacks. To deal with them, he has been been immersing himself in his "hobby" of building more versions of the Iron Man armor, of which, by the beginning of the film, there are already 42 iterations.
However, Tony is put on a collision course with trouble when a murderous terrorist calling himself "The Mandarin" disrupts television broadcasts around the world, virtually boasting of the destruction he has wrought and will continue to inflict. He seems like just the kind of threat that the world needs Iron Man to fight. The plot thickens when Killian, now running his previously hypothetical think-tank and looking rather dashing, resurfaces at Stark Industries, an attempts to seduce its CEO, Pepper, with the promise of a technology that can "upgrade" the human body, called "Extremis." However, it all gets personal for Tony when his former bodyguard, Happy Hogan (Jon Favreau, also director of the previous two installments) follows Killian's shady-looking henchman Savin (James Badge Dale) to what appears to be a drug drop-off at Grumman's Chinese Theater and ends up nearly getting blown to pieces by what appears to be an exploding man. Several other people are not so lucky. The Mandarin interrupts television broadcasts again to take responsibility for the explosion.
Outside the hospital where Happy is confined, Tony vows to take down the Mandarin, not realizing that the worst is yet to come. Soon, he'll need the help of his staunch friend Col. James "Rhodey" Rhodes (Don Cheadle), a spunky 10-year-old boy named Harley (Ty Simpkin) and his ever loyal roving artificial intelligence J.A.R.V.I.S. (Paul Bettany) to get back in the fight and stop the Mandarin, who intends to kill the President of the United States (William Sadler).
Truth be told, I was not looking forward to this film. I was hard-pressed to imagine how a solo Iron Man film could be satisfying after the superhero buffet that was The Avengers, and the trailer did very little for me.
Fortunately, however, Black got me hooked on this film with a surprisingly fresh approach to the character. Without giving too much away, in this film Tony finds himself without his high-tech toys or even his considerably small support network. Here, it's basically just him and his smarts going up against an enemy with a seemingly infinite reach and bunch of superhuman soldiers juiced up on Extremis. It almost feels as if, when conceiving this film, Black and his cohorts used as their starting point Captain America's line addressed to Iron Man in The Avengers that went, "Big man in a suit of armor; take that away and what are you?" They basically took all of that away.
What they didn't take away was the wicked sense of humor that made the first Iron Man film and The Avengers so eminently watchable. In fact, if anything Black and Pearce added their own flavor of humor to the brand, which was infinitely funnier than Justin Theroux's juvenile idiocy in part 2.
Speaking of part 2, this film shows that the filmmakers have apparently learned quite a bit from the mistakes made back then; there is nary a S.H.I.E.L.D. agent in sight, and apart from recalling Tony's experience in New York and a couple of quips by supporting characters, there is no significant reference made to the Avengers, or any ham-handed attempt to set up another "Avengers" movie. Even Samuel L. Jackson takes a break from his nigh-obligatory cameo for once. Cheadle's Rhodes gives a bit of a throwaway explanation as to why the Avengers can't get involved in the situation, but even thought it wasn't the best possible explanation I was grateful that the filmmakers punctuated the fact that we didn't have to worry about multiple references to Marvel's flagship team film. Also, it's worth pointing out that Tony doesn't fight guys in their own suits of armor.
More important than just steering clear of the flaws of part 2, here Black manages to extract from Downey, Jr. an even better performance than Favreau ever did. More than in any of the other films, Downey, Jr. really gets to flex his acting chops because here Tony spends a lot more time out of the armor than he has since he was first introduced to audiences, but it is certainly time well-spent. Qualities like his ingenuity, tenacity and ability to overcome the odds come to the fore, and he even gets a pretty intense action sequence sans the armor, going up against a much more powerful foe with nothing more than his quick wits to save his behind. Electrifying stuff. Critically though, Stark's humanity is more evident here than it ever has been; his adventures in New York have left Tony with quite a bit of post-traumatic stress, and it's to the filmmakers credit that they actually chose to depict this in a superhero. Supporting players Cheadle, Paltrow and Favreau give Downey, Jr. some solid back-up, but really, it is not as if he needs it here.
The new kids on the block, Pearce, Hall and especially Kingsley, are all extremely talented thespians in their own right but Black plays to all their strengths, even if Pearce overcooks the "nerdy" Killian early in the film a little bit. The young Simpkin was a revelation in his small but fairly meaty role. I'm not always a huge fan of the concept of the pint-sized sidekick but it worked quite well in this movie, and I love the way Simpkin and Downey, Jr. played off each other.
What I found particularly remarkable about the film was that all things considered, it didn't exactly reinvent the wheel, there were some well-known story tropes at work, including those which were used in relatively recent films, but even when handling the familiar, Black makes it all work. It's all in the telling. I know comics purists may have issues with a number of the liberties taken (including what may feel like a couple of big ones) but to my mind they serviced a generally well-done story, and therefore the greater good.
I confess I missed the work of visual effects house Industrial Light and Magic, but their successors, including Weta Digital and Digital Domain certainly did an admirable job filling in their iron boots. I hadn't planned on seeing this film in 3-D as I am not the biggest fan of post-production conversion in general, but the 3-D screening was the most convenient and I'll give Marvel points for pulling off a smoother conversion job here than they did with The Avengers last year. It's still no Avatar, though, at least as far as 3-D is concerned. Still, if you're not the type to cough up the premium for this kind of thing, then I don't think your experience of the film will be significantly diminished.
This is an excellent way to kick off the "summer movie season," and it certainly isn't a bad way to get out of the Metro Manila heat for two hours and fifteen minutes.
4/5
No comments:
Post a Comment