Iron
Man Three
*½/****
starring
Robert Downey Jr., Gwyneth Paltrow, Don Cheadle, Ben Kingsley
screenplay
by Drew Pearce & Shane Black
directed
by Shane Black
by
Walter Chaw I laughed once during Shane Black's Iron
Man 3–an unfortunate milestone for me and Black's
films, which I
have found, without exception, pretty amusing. That one moment is a
reference serial post-modernist and industrialist Tony Stark (Robert Downey Jr.)
makes to
Michael Crichton's 1973 cult fantasia Westworld.
The Tony Stark character is not just the cocksure pop-cultural embodiment of Roland Barthes's work on semiotics and myth: he'd be Barthes's greatest subject for analysis–the object that presumes a pop-cultural universal constant. The place where Black works, in other words, is that place where everyone's seen and read and heard everything they "should have" seen and read and heard. When Stark drops the Westworld bomb, then, we understand the implication that Stark is observing an evil henchman to not only appear to be robotic and indestructible, but maybe sexy and Yul Brynner-esque as well–maybe a female fantasy, maybe a "stupid sexy Flanders" homosexual fantasy. Certainly there's a recognition that dropping a reference like this is pleasurable in a way that structuralism would appreciate, but only for the nerd bourgeoisie. It's a moment meant to create a sense of exclusionary cloister in the midst of one of the most widely-dissembled entertainments in human history, and I liked that.
The rest of Iron Man
3 is a surprisingly tedious checklist of Shane Black-isms,
starting with a
weary Downey Jr. voiceover and framing story that could've been ported
over
directly from Black's Kiss Kiss Bang Bang and
continuing through the
destruction of a stilt house, a fight on a Christmas tree lot (and its
attendant use of a Christmas carol on the soundtrack), and a finale on
a
freighter. There's a gratifying amount of violence and ugly fatalities
and at
least lip-service paid to our culture of Homeland Security, but the
buddy-movie
elements–the greatest Shane Black-ism of all, frankly–fall flat here,
and
without some kind of investment in characters we could possibly give a
crap
about, it's really, truly boring. The most interesting thing about the picture is that a mid-film reveal that forgives the casting
of Ben
Kingsley as arch-villain The Mandarin also reminds a lot of the odious,
slapstick Leo Getz/Joe Pesci character from Black's Lethal
Weapon 2
script. What I'm saying is that while there's enough of Black in here
to make Iron
Man 3 the best of the trilogy, all that really says is
that I have a
fairly low opinion of the other two. I would argue, though, that the Iron Man series has value when it indicts the media culture's role in the creation of monsters and heroes–how we are in the process of mythologizing our trauma nowadays even as the trauma unfolds.
What I didn't like was the creation of a
Bin Laden-manqué as Iron Man 3's big-bad, The Mandarin, a hodgepodge of
yellow
peril and hatred/fear of Arab culture that the other
big-bad, big giant
Aryan Aldrich Killian (Guy Pearce), uses to further his own nefarious
ends. It suggests a commentary on our culture of fear, yet in marginalizing
it I
don't know that Black has actually made a point. See, either we're
silly to be
afraid of Asians and Arabs and should actually be more afraid of
domestic
threats–or, in addition to a completely justifiable fear of Asians and
Arabs,
we should also fear domestic threats. A moment at the three-quarters
mark where
The Mandarin assassinates someone on live television, for
example, is clarified as neither theatre nor reality. The spectre of
Internet and communications
terrorism is raised (much like the spectre of suicide bombing, made
immediate by the recent events in Boston), but Iron Man 3
wants more to acknowledge
and then to move on with the "safer" revenge angle wherein Stark
seeks to avenge his fallen buddy and, inevitably, his imperilled
ladylove
(Gwyneth Paltrow). It's essentially just provocative images in the
service of a
vanilla plot and becomes, in that way, something very much like a
middlebrow-pleasing exploitation flick in the vein of a Titanic
or a Pearl
Harbor. A special-effects extravaganza that fantasizes a
righting of a
collective wrong; when the Don Cheadle character's "War Machine" is
given a patriotic paint job to the derision of the talking-head
contingent
(Bill Maher and Joan Rivers, making cameos as themselves), the takeaway
is not
so much self-knowing critique as self-hating excoriation.
Iron Man 3 so skilfully evades tackling
the real issues it
raises that audience engagement becomes a casualty. If Black can be
accused of
anything, it's his assiduous dodging of consequence and his reluctance
to frame a causal event as anything other than a personal offense in
need of violent
correction. Iron Man 3 mentions sexual jealousy,
missing fathers,
terrorism, racism, the media, fear-mongering, martial law, the dangers
of
technology (including a noble act in the epilogue that plays like so
much Terminator
2 liberal blather–especially after a full thirty minutes of
things-go-boom), the meaning of commitment, patriotism, treason–but it
only
deals with how its hero, playboy Stark, has become a domesticated
hamster and,
in this one, a replacement dad, out to make the world safe for
children. It's
not a space I'm comfortable in, being patronized and glad-handed,
tucked in safe and warm in exact contradiction to the lessons of a movie
co-starring Shane
Black, Predator, that at least had the balls to
say that technological
advantages in war win neither hearts, nor minds, nor the war
itself. Iron Man 3 is loud and
boring, its
action sequences without stakes, its villains possessed of a glowy,
glowy power
that renders them either super-strong, or fast-healing, or pyrokinetic,
or
immortal, or invulnerable, or power sinks somehow, or…or…or
whatever it is they need to be able to do to be visually interesting or
threatening to
our hero. The special effects are nice. Guy Pearce is in good shape.
Gwyneth
Paltrow is an effective icon for gaffed privilege on the rocks. And
Downey Jr.
cashes another paycheck. Stay past the credits for the best performance
in the
film…and hope the inevitable success of Iron Man 3 finances Black's next
three Kiss Kiss Bang Bangs.
It’s a step up from IM2, but that’s not saying much. A little too much “ghosts of Lethal Weapons past” for me. Stark’s Malibu mansion destruction was too reminiscent of the trashing of Murtaugh’s home in 3 out of 4 LW intallments. And after LW2, 4, The A-Team, Eraser and no doubt countless other films I can’t be bothered to name and know, can there be a moratorium on action scenes set in a shipping dock, involving cranes and containers?
The movie’s best action set piece, involving daisy-chaining free-falling crew members of Air Force One, had me thinking how much better a Bigelow or Cameron would have shot that scene.
That mid-film reveal, however is a keeper and provided my biggest belly laugh in the cinemas so far this year.
Having said that, I’m still trying to figure out what it is about Sir Ben that so pisses off Walter.
Walter I think you’ve nailed exactly what all three of these movies are. Vanilla spectacle paying only lipservice to any real issues in today’s America.
Basically, Sir Ben (we mustn’t forget the “Sir”, as Lucky Number Slevin reminded us) comes across as a pretentious over-actor a lot of the time. Schindler’s List aside – where he wisely remained in the background, allowing Liam Neeson and Ralph Fiennes to rightly shine – he’s rarely, truly, impressed me. (A rare indication of Spielberg showing restraint, I might add.)
I think you can make the case that the first “Iron Man” takes a definitive stand of some kind… something about the military industrial complex causing and solving its own problems. Still, it strikes a weird note with its terrorists having no motive, religion or culture, and the series only gets more half-assed from there. I have no idea what Iron Man 3 thought it was doing by making its bad guy a Middle Eastern terrorist with justifiable anger at the United States only to reveal that it was just Old Man Withers trying to scare kids away from his treasure.