The effects emphasize the weight and bulk of his metallic suit and the difficulty of aerial navigation with powerful thrusters on the bottoms of one's feet. It just gives our anti-hero a chance to become our hero, in the guise of Iron Man.ĭowney and the CGI both lend gravity to the Man of Titanium Alloy. That's all quite true, but it's not presented as a terribly convincing plot point here. Until Tony is captured, that is, and he begins to understand that there's a lot more to power, and leadership, than brute weaponry can ever convey. Tony and Obadiah are old-world Bush-Doctrine perpetual-war profiteers (listen for the untranslated word "Halliburton" in the dialogue of one of the Afghan terrorissimos): They believe in spreading and maintaining unilateral American dominance through military and economic means, and give lip service to the pseudo-patriotic sentiment that whatever is good for Stark Industries is good for the good ol' US of A. You may wish to repeat it, like a mantra, as you go through the rest of your day. Let us take a moment, now, to thank the creator of that name: Obadiah Stane.
Though he has plowed his way through more bimbos than he even wants to remember, Tony's real intimates are the best that money can't buy: his best buddy Jim Rhodes ( Terrence Howard), the military half of a not-at-all-complex military-industrial friendship his endearing Girl Friday Pepper Potts ( Gwyneth Paltrow), who brings repressed passion to her professional role as a personal assistant and his business partner Obadiah Stane ( Jeff Bridges, with Lex Luthor dome and Irish Wolfhound chin). It's like Bill Gates once said: No matter how much you pay for a hamburger, how much better is it going to taste?
In his private jet, sure, but doesn't he find it annoying to be that wealthy and still constrained by the laws of physics? He can afford anything he wants, but his TV still shows the same "Access Hollywood" crap that's available to everybody else. So what if he lives in a Starship Enterprise house perched on a seaside cliff in Malibu? He still has to fly for long, boring stretches to get to faraway places. This guy is so unbelievably, fantastically wealthy that the very concept of money loses all meaning. Like a hawkish version of Steve Jobs, Tony is not only a master salesman and showman but a real engineer who can assemble astonishingly sophisticated equipment from basic materials - in his garage or a secret prison-cave in No-Man's-'Stan. He's the embodiment of the military-industrial complex that President Eisenhower warned against in 1961 - a financial superhero for whom war is good business, and whose business interests guarantee there will always be a market for war. Tony is the brilliant prodigal heir to the weapons-manufacturing fortune of Stark Industries, the gargantuan techno-blammo conglomerate built by his titan of a father.
(Favreau himself has worked out with The Groundlings troupe in Los Angeles from time to time.) It's difficult to tell how much of what they're doing is taken directly from the script ( credited to four writers, and who knows how many others labored behind the scenes), but even when they're reciting somber dialog-bubble exposition, they treat it the way an improv actor would: smoothly feeding information into the scene, building a foundation on which everybody can work, and play. The reason it's so nimble is that director Jon Favreau (" Elf," " Zathura") and his fleet crew of actors grasp the action-fantasy premise and treat it with the looseness and sharpness of improvisational comedy.
Is this political commentary of some kind, or just exploitation? Like its hero "Iron Man" takes false steps, stumbles, and even occasionally crashes, yet quickly recovers its footing.
It won't be the first time that this gaudy piece of summer-movie pulp fiction strays a little too far into bloody Mess o' Potamian reality for comfort.
Right on cue, an IED detonates, the Hummers are ambushed by Taliban-esque fighters, the American soldiers are slaughtered, and Tony is kidnapped.