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Dir. Jon Favreau
Rating: 6.8 | 0 User Reviews | Send to Friend
You certainly have to give Marvel's fledgling studio and director Jon Favreau this much: The film successfully incorporates a perfect fulcrum of the Three Holy Tiers of Geekdom: technology, comics and hot babes. Of the last few years' spate of superhero flicks, I would still put this a hair or two below Bryan Singer's excellent first two X-Men films, but above just about everything else. Like many other comic-based stories, this one concerns a callous man who's forced to revisit his morality. The hero's journey, in this case, starts in Afghanistan, where playboy-billionaire-weapons industrialist (is there any other kind?) Tony Stark (Robert Downey Jr.) has just finished displaying his latest explosive wares to rave reviews. Traveling in a military motorcade, his envoy is ambushed and he is taken prisoner by nefarious -- wholly unidentified -- terrorists, who keep him prisoner in order to force him to build them one of his company's wildly successful weapons. Instead, with the help of another prisoner scientist, Yinsen (Shaun Toub), Stark builds a suit of armor powerful enough to blast his way to freedom. Back in the States, he cultivates his new sense of wisdom and orders his company to stop manufacturing weapons -- while simultaneously creating a new, far more powerful prototype armor so that he might undo some of the evil his company, led by business tycoon Obadiah Stane (Jeff Bridges), has perpetrated through the world. As a message of peaceful optimism, the film offers a seriously mixed message -- but as an action movie with slightly more under its hard casing, it's pretty kick-ass. True, it does fall into the all-too-common superhero trap -- found most glaringly in Sam Raimi's Spiderman movies -- giving short-shrift to the villain so that they never really seem like much of a threat to the hero, but never-the-less, it succeeds in a way that few films of the genre manage to accomplish: The characters are more interesting without their super costumes. Downey Jr. is, of course, a natural fit for the role of Stark, but Favreau has also lined up equally adept heavy-hitters as Gwenyth Paltrow, Bridges and Terrence Howard, to balance the film's core. Needless to say, a film of this nature looks and sounds shockingly good in its Blu-ray form, clear, precise and deep, which greatly enhances the effects, both practical (very impressive) and CGI (reasonably passable.)
This heavy-metal disc is laden down further by the abundance of extras and features, including an assortment deleted and/or extended scenes, three mult-part featurettes on the making of the film and its extraordinary special effects, and Downey Jr.'s original screen test.
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