“We’re in a culture where people want to be deafened, apparently. And there’s an elegance, which is somehow missing. It used to be that when people talked, they talked in a very communicative way. They varied their tone, they varied their pitch. Now they just yell at you until you fall down. And that’s what I don’t like.”
– Shane Black, 1997
If you want to be sardonic (and who doesn’t these days?), you can note that Shane Black is responsible for penning those demure, measured, elegant films Lethal Weapon, The Long Kiss Goodnight and The Last Boy Scout, and now he’s taken the reins for Iron Man 3, which by its very nature (third film of a Marvel superhero series) seemed all but guaranteed to be a deafening experience. Given that Iron Man 2 was both overstuffed with incidents and characters, and underfed when it came to actual payoffs, and that we witnessed NYC get all but leveled in The Avengers last summer, what was there left to anticipate? And yes, to get it out of the way, the latest episode in the life of glib millionaire genius Tony Stark (Robert Downey Jr.) has all the clang and clatter you’d expect. What you might not expect is that the clang and clatter has a distinct authorial stamp, for Black hasn’t yet encountered a genre which he couldn’t slyly subvert; check out his previous directorial effort Kiss Kiss Bang Bang, which took a hammer to the private eye thriller even as it enjoyed all the cliches contained therein.
The collision of Black’s style with the hitherto sanitized, weightless Marvel universe strikes some unusual sparks. Zippy and quippy, Iron Man 3 is like a greatest hits collection of Black’s previous work, featuring a traumatized lead hero (hello Mel Gibson), helicopter attacks (hello again Mel Gibson), a surprising amount of gunplay (triple hello, Mel Gibson!), barroom brawls, a Christmas time frame (the original Lethal Weapon), a bunch of hoary plot devices (secret files in folders marked “secret” anyone?), and a propensity to rough up his lead characters (Stark sports nasty cuts and bruises for three quarters of the film’s running time). Should we add that the banter between Stark and his straight-laced military buddy Jim Rhodes (Don Cheadle) bears a rather suspicious resemblance to Sergeants Riggs and Murtaugh from Lethal Weapon? It’s a shame that Cheadle doesn’t get the opportunity to grumble “I’m getting too old for this shit.”
And yet we don’t mind the recycling because Black is clearly motivated by fun rather than cynicism, and he’s generous with his characters — walk-on players, such as Adam Pally as a TV reporter and Stark groupie, get a chance to steal the stage rather than just stand there. Even a nameless henchman gets his day in the sun (“Honestly I hate working here… it’s so weird“). This is an Iron Man movie which is fully aware of its place in the ever-expansive pop continuum, and Black is canny enough to contribute to the cultural dialogue by throwing in jokes and riffs for all ages. Today’s in-crowd gets a Downton Abbey gag with Stark’s bodyguard Happy (Jon Favreau), while old-timers get to savor some shout-outs to the halcyon 1980s (Stark addresses a bespectacled lad, “Loved you in A Christmas Story“). Iron Man 3 also goes against the grain of the previous entry in its defiantly down-to-earth attention to the man underneath the suit. Shaken by his near-death experience in The Avengers, Stark begins the movie as any nervous-wreck superhero would: buried in his workshop, churning out one Iron Man suit after another (he’s up to Mark 42), and despite the ministrations of his gal Pepper (Gwyneth Paltrow, still game but a bit mooshy this time around), it’s clear it will take something momentous to shake him from his stupor. That something comes with the appearance of the Mandarin (Ben Kingsley), a mega-terrorist with a bone to pick about America the Beautiful and numerous bombings to his credit. When one of the bombings leaves Happy in a coma, it gets personal for Stark, but what he doesn’t know is that it was personal from the start; a prologue set in Switzerland over a decade before recounts his dalliance with a geneticist (Rebecca Hall), and his snubbing of fellow industrialist Aldrich Killian (slick, insinuating Guy Pearce), both events somehow tying into the Mandarin’s scourge of terror.
It might sound like the template for every other superhero movie, and the central mysteries surrounding these characters aren’t very mysterious — we figure out what’s going on long before Stark does. Fortunately, Black isn’t as interested in story calisthenics as he is in puncturing expectations at nearly every turn. Take the Mandarin: draped in Middle Eastern accoutrements, drenched in middle-American affect, spouting cultural dogma like fortune cookies, a send-up of Colonel Kurtz in Apocalypse Now filmed in short-attention span soundbites, Kingsley has a ball playing a media-savvy villain, like Sacha Baron Cohen’s great dictator with a budget and better PR. And then there are those Iron Man suits in all colors and configurations, getting blown up, smashed up, or appropriated by every major character (at various points Pepper, Killian, the President of the USA (Bill Sadler) and a few sundry henchmen get to try them on, both voluntarily and involuntarily). Perversely, Stark spends most of the film outside his armor (many of his heroic moments are performed by remote control), boiled down to wise-guy basics, and Downey, who has always been the series’ not-so-secret weapon, stretches the character in new, sincere (gasp!) directions. This time around he gets to bounce off some fresh companions, including a small-town Tennessee kid who aids him in his time of need (Ty Simpkins lands on the right side of the charming/cloying scale) and true to form, he doesn’t go all mooshy: “Dads leave, no need to be a pussy about it,” is his response when the kid tells him his sad family history.
Ultimately, though, folks are paying to see the suit, and Black must oblige with the usual high-flying sequences. Some have a refreshing old-school feel to them (a mid-air rescue on Air Force One gets the point across with a minimum of fuss) while your eyes might glaze over a bit with others, like in the literal deus ex machina finale set in a shipyard (Lethal Weapon 2, anyone?). For all the effort spent on the man under the armor, there’s a slight twinge of disappointment when you realize that the man still requires the armor, and the resultant deafening action (however well-choreographed). Give Black credit for recognizing the dichotomy: Tony has rigged his suit so that it can “leap” onto his body, and the sight of the Iron Man costume slamming onto Downey like a straitjacket is a metaphor for the man and the movie. We’re far way from the streamlined, good-natured hijinks of the first Iron Man, and while Iron Man 3 doesn’t leave the same fizzy aftertaste, it’s rousing enough to merit a place among the better Marvel movies. The strangely serene (and out-of-left-field) denouement suggests that Tony has left the Iron Man and all that persona entails behind– maybe — but in the battle between humanity and the movie-making machine, call Iron Man 3 a split decision. ■
