5-13-10 Movie Review - Iron Man 2

Noncommercial movie showings are about to pick up a little, with three this week, one a beginning of a new limited series. Tonight, at 7:30, the Murdock Theatre at 536 North Broadway is showing one of Bettie Davis’s best “Women’s movies” of the forties, Now, Voyager, the ultraromance in which Paul Henried does a bit with two cigarettes that had the tobacco people swooning in 1942, with Claude Raines, Bonita Granville, Gladys Copper, and Ilka Chase, from a best-seller by Olive Higgins Prouty, the Danielle Steele of her day. And next Wednesday at 6:30, the Murdock starts its summer series of Metropolitan Opera showings with a repeat of Armida, which kept me entertained a while ago for four hours, and I was not an opera fan before, though I may be now. That’s Wednesday at 6:30, on the new big screen, with the new sound system. And I loved it, even with my crippled ears. And tomorrow night at 6:30, the Laurel and Hardy fan club has one of its usual programs, with the feature Blockheads and the Oscar short “The Music Box” with Laurel and Hardy, the Three Stooges short “An Ache in Every Stake,” the Edgar Kennedy short “It’s Your Move,” and Charlie Chaplin and Mack Swain in the short “His Musical Career,” in the Calvary Methodist Church, 2525 North Rock Road.

Or you could prefer more conventional summer fare and see Iron Man 2.

I must admit that comic-book stuff like Iron Man 2, with its awkward mixture of juvenile superheroics and supposedly realistic psychological subthemes and political relevance, is just not my cup of tea, though neither was Spiderman 2, which was in many ways similar and which I loved. And while I usually see this kind of pulp-comic brutality fantasy only in snippets on television while waiting for something more to my taste to come on, I suspect that Robert Downey and Mickey Roark do much better than most actors who are stuck in this kind of boilerplate usually do. As always, the special-effects people require a half a minute of the credits and so their work extremely well, and there’s no end of bang-bang and boom with no concern for credibility.

But writer Justin Theroaux and director Jon Favreau seem to have exhausted their imagination with dreaming up the title; I can’t but assume that Roark’s superheated electric whiplashes came from the comic book, and they’re the only remotely new element we have. Sam Rockwell is excellent as a munitions manufacturer you have seen many times before though never better; Gwyneth Paltrow would love to have something to do as a corporate CEO but is overshadowed, almost replaced, by Scarlett Johansson as a catwoman secretary; and Samuel L. Jackson is waiting for the next sequel to justify his presence. Don Cheadle is so nearly Iron Man himself as to hardly qualify as the usual sidekick. And the plot is the usual world-domination stuff, which reminds me: for a person we are supposed to believe is personally responsible for world peace, Iron Man is unforgivably irresponsible and unsympathetic: keep in mind that through most of the movie, he is literally dying and knows it. And, with his death will come world war.

Ayn Rand might have drawn a line before Iron Man.

It’s fine of its type, but it’s a pretty tired type.