Tag: Robert Downey Jr.

Movie Review: Avengers: Age of Ultron (2015)

I remember spending a lot of time in my local library as a kid. It was close, within safe walking distance from my house, and beyond a few people who hung out and read magazines they didn’t want to subscribe to, it was just me, the librarians, and a whole lot of books. Browsing the stacks one day, I found these gigantic treasury editions of 60s and 70s Marvel Comics, which I checked out and read every week for three years. My favorite of them was Marvel’s Greatest Superhero Battles, its cover promising an epic clash between The Hulk and The Thing, my two favorite characters in the yet cinematically undiscovered country that was the Marvel Universe. This was the 1990s, and, say what you will about Stan Lee, but the way he wrote his superheroes (and the way Jack Kirby, Herb Trimpe, Sal Buschema, and John Romita (among others) drew them) still had a way of speaking that appealed directly to this very particular sense of selfhood I was developing. Bruce Banner was a quiet man, Benjamin Grimm a soft-hearted lunk. One wanted to be left alone. The other was doomed to be forever unhappy with his body. I got that. I identified with it. And, sealed away in these treasury books, they belonged to a world that only I had access to.

Had you told nine-year-old me that The Hulk would be a cornerstone of one of the world’s most successful film franches—man, I don’t even know. 27-year-old me can hardly believe it, and I have lived experience of summers spent in multiplexes that weren’t showing a superhero of some kind. Sitting in the dark waiting for Avengers: Age of Ultron to start, there were three trailers for upcoming superhero films, and I was late. The next in Disney’s Avengers sequence, Ant-Man, is coming out in July. We barely get a month to rest up between episodes now, such is the cultural demand for city-destroying bacchanalia. I was tired. I was restless. I wanted to shove nine-year-old me into a locker for liking this stuff. And when the film started, I was largely still exhausted. Joss Whedon’s latest venture into the Marvel Cinematic Universe is overstuffed and overlong, struggling to contain itself, even at two-hours and 20-minutes. A lot of the bloat, at this point, must be attributed to the fact that an Avengers movie isn’t just a movie—it’s part of a cycle, and, as such, is part of a feedback loop that looks back as far as 2008 and looks forward as far as the heat death of the universe. Around that, Whedon, admirably, is going for something more here than in Avengers. Meglomaniacs get smashed-up real good and the physical and psychic trauma of 9/11 is exported to a countries real and imaginary, but it’s clear at this point that Whedon is most in his element when the world is quiet and his team has divested itself of their spandex.

Then, he can get down to the real meat of Marvel Comics, which is that beneath the spectacle and muscle, superheroes are really just damaged human beings who are very uncomfortable with their bodies. This has been a sub-plot of most MCU films for awhile now, the whole “He’s just a man, but I’ve got an army!” deal, but Whedon’s script ventures beyond that, ruminating on the fallibility of flesh. His villain, Ultron (James Spader), a malevolent, sassy robot whose AI bears a striking resemblance to Tony Stark (Robert Downey, Jr.), sees the body as a necessary step forward in his evolution. Stark knows he will die, leaving his project of world peace unfinished. Hawkeye (Jeremy Renner) is just a regular dude with a bow and arrow. Captain America (Chris Evans) is still acclimating to a world where most of his friends have died. Bruce Banner (Mark Ruffalo) is doomed to be ashamed of his monstrous, green alter-ego, and Black Widow (Scarlett Johansson) has a past that involves bodily disfiguration. Where a villain like Ultron (or Loki, or the assembled horde of Hydra bad guys, or men in knock-off Iron Man gear) see this as the team’s weakness, it’s the axis upon which the whole thing spins—there aren’t many people who could understand their individual circumstances, but they’re all here in a room together, drunkenly trying to lift the hammer that lets Thor (Chris Hemsworth) lay claim to the throne of Asgard.

But at this point, it’s not enough to truly satisfy. MCU films are, like a hang-out sitcom, an excuse to sit around and chuckle with a group of favorite characters, mind turned off. Battle sequences are well-executed, if perfunctory and consequence free. If you don’t check in on Marvel’s televised output, it’d be easy to assume that the fallout from any given fight is a paycheck from the Stark Relief Fund (which, man, that name) and a new life in a city that maybe won’t host a rampaging Hulk. I feel like complaining about the lack of stakes after eleven Marvel films, far from being a fruitless endeavor, reveals something about the limits of popcorn filmmaking, or at least the men responsible for making them. The Avengers: Age of Ultron can be nitpicked to death or praised for things that happen or are imagined to have happened at its fringes, but at heart this is a big, dumb action movie trying a little too hard to sound smart. This, in general, works for me. I am, if anything, overly enthusiastic about The Fast and the Furious‘ focus on makeshift chosen families, and am still fascinated with The Dark Knight and The Dark Knight Rises‘ attempt and failure to engage with philosophical theory and political science. Whedon does the same here, toying with ideas of fatherhood, Catholicism, and ruined women, but all too frequently it feels like he’s wrestling a Wikipedia page and not the idea itself. The drama will continue in the next wave of Avengers movies, we’re promised, but just once I’d like to see a Marvel movie that is a movie first, rather than an advertisement for an upcoming slate. I’d like something real to chew on. I’d like to go home not dreading the prospect that, someday soon, it will not be enough for a comic book movie to merely entertain me for three hours. Like the villains of these pieces so frequently say, it’s time to evolve. If only the folks behind the camera were listening.

The Avengers: Age of Ultron. With Robert Downey, Jr. (Tony Stark/Iron Man), Chris Hemsworth (Thor), Mark Ruffalo (Bruce Banner/Hulk), Chris Evans (Steve Rogers/Captain America), Scarlett Johansson (Natasha Romanoff/Black Widow), Jeremy Renner (Clint Barton/Hawkeye), Aaron Taylor-Johnson (Quicksilver), Elizabeth Olsen (Scarlet Witch), James Spader (Ultron), and Samuel L. Jackson (Nick Fury). Directed by Joss Whedon from a screenplay by Whedon, based on the Marvel Comics characters created by Stan Lee and Jack Kirby.

May 13, 2015
Movie Review: Iron Man 3 (2013)

The narrative purpose of any post-Avengers Marvel movie is not to majorly shake-up any of the characters at the core of the franchise—regardless of what Iron Man 3’s closing narration has to say about Tony Stark (Robert Downey, Jr.) and his place in the world, everything you know about him going in remains the same at the end—but to slowly push each individual piece away from alien-wasted Manhattan, towards the next apocalypse. With that in mind, director Shane Black does fine work within the paint-by-numbers structure of a solo Avengers outing. Tony Stark is charming, crass, egotistical, and the possessor of enviable wealth, fame, and success. He deals with the fallout of Manhattan—he freaks out at the mention of wormholes—and with the wreckage of an impetuous youth. In the end, he is Iron Man, and Black and Downey do their best to mash that triumphant, wailing note as long and as loud as humanly possible.

This is the beginning of Marvel Studio’s much-hyped “Phase Two” of Avengers movies, and, while they’ve got the formula figured out, holes in the fabric are beginning to show. However fine or fleshed-out the assembled Avengers seem, the love-interests, friends, and rivals propping up the individual pillars of the eventual tent of proportions beyond belief are frustratingly one-note. This is the third Iron Man film where Stark’s opponent is a disenfranchised corporate raider, where Stark’s claim that he’s not going to play ball with the United States government clashes with the need for him to protect the American status quo, and where Pepper Potts (Gwyneth Paltrow) serves as Iron Man’s damsel in distress. Marvel Studios will probably never run out of oily businessmen, things that go boom, or plots against America, but considering that the best parts of Iron Man 3 occur just beyond that storytelling triumvirate is enough to make thoughts of such comic book movies pleasurable.

The script—based on modern comics legend Warren Ellis’ Extremis, which provided the blueprint that brought Iron Man to the screen—looks back at Tony Stark before his transformative stay-over in Afghanistan, where his genius was preoccupied by liquor and women. At a New Year’s Eve party, he flirts with Maya Hansen (Rebecca Hall), a botanist who is working on a chemical compound that allows organic lifeforms to regenerate lost limbs. This work—and Stark’s bankroll—is much admired by Aldrich Killian (Guy Pearce), a crippled man who has risen up from his circumstances to lead a radical biotech think-tank, Advanced Idea Mechanics. Twenty years later, after Stark has glimpsed an alternate dimension, Killian reemerges at the offices of Stark Industries, impossibly handsome and courting a business relationship with Pepper, Tony’s hand-chosen CEO. When suspicious head of security Happy Hogan (Jon Favreau) is sent to the hospital as a result of his investigation into Killian, a mysterious terrorist known as The Mandarin (Ben Kingsley) claims responsibility. Stark, sleepless since Manhattan, stares deep into the recording smartphone of a TMZ reporter and swears revenge. The Mandarin, well-rested in his undisclosed compound, replies to Stark’s challenge by bombing his opulent mansion.

Hansen and Killian are tied up in all of this, but how, I will not say. It’s in the aftermath of this attack on Stark’s property (and, one assumes, the vault of armor he’s been working on while awake), that Iron Man 3 lets loose a little. Previous Iron Man movies have toyed with the idea that their villains could somehow gain possession of either Stark’s armor or the War Machine (rechristened Iron Patriot here, and given a Captain America paint job) rig donned by Stark’s buddy James Rhodes (Don Cheadle, as the straight-man to Downey’s buddy cop), but rarely have him out of the armor for long. With his suit dead and his AI malfunctioning, Tony Stark spends the majority of Iron Man 3 without a suit. This doesn’t exactly make the stakes any higher—Tony Stark is a man of rippling musculature and Hawking smarts, so it’s not like the suit is compensating for a lack of anything—but, in forcing him to rely on help from a kid (Ty Simpkins)—who is something of a budding, rural Iron Man himself—provides the series a much-needed breath of fresh air.

Still, it’s impossible to regard Iron Man 3 as anything more than a small cog in an impossibly large machine. Here are the further adventures of a man who has touched the fringes of the cosmos, who has built himself a mind-controlled suit that allows him to fly. While I don’t exactly enter a Marvel Studios offering expecting it to ponder the universe, it’s curious to me that, in Tony Stark, they’ve managed to so effectively lash a man and his jetpack to Earth. Iron Man 3’s pleasures are small and terrestrial. As soon as it stops making money, Tony Stark’s smirking visage will be replaced by the flowing, flaxen locks of Thor, an iron suit swapped out for an iron hammer. The machine will continue to assemble these small dramas, pushing out from the port of one Avengers movie to the next. I wonder, will they all be so modest? If so, Marvel Studios has not succeeded in creating a universe, but a facsimile of the publishing house that birthed it, at its most conservative. Theirs is not a house of ideas, but of pleasing mediocrities.

Iron Man 3. With Robert Downey, Jr. (Tony Stark/Iron Man), Gwyneth Paltrow (Pepper Potts), Don Cheadle (Col. James Rhodes/Iron Patriot), Guy Pearce (Aldrich Killian), Rebecca Hall (Dr. Maya Hansen), Jon Favreau (Happy Hogan), Ty Simpkins (Harley), and Ben Kingsley (The Mandarin). Directed by Shane Black and produced by Kevin Feige. Screenplay by Drew Pearce and Black, based on “Iron Man” by Stan Lee, Larry Leiber, Don Heck, and Jack Kirby, and “Extremis,” by Warren Ellis and Adi Granov.

May 6, 2013
Movie Review: The Avengers (2012)

A time-displaced soldier. A Norse god. A playboy billionaire genius. A brilliant scientist who turns into a raging monster when angry. A former Russian spy. An expert marksman. On paper, a team comprised of six individuals this vastly different shouldn’t work. There are egos to deal with, competitive urges, the occasional extinction-level event. Since 1963, the Avengers have walked the very fine line between being Earth’s Mightiest Heroes and Earth’s Largest Screw-Ups. All it took back then was an assortment of popular comic book characters and the retrospectively brilliant idea of bringing a World War II era hero back from the publishing grave. In 2012, to get The Avengers together under the auspices of one movie took a more herculean effort: Five good-to-great movies serving as pretense, an assemblage of the right actors playing the right characters, and the right director at the helm of so much potential chaos. (more…)

May 6, 2012