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Tired old friend

Deborah Ross

Wednesday, 30th April 2008

Iron Man
12A, Nationwide

So our hero returns home, to his Thunderbirds-style pad perched on a cliff top in Malibu and to his lovely, svelte lady assistant who has no idea and is Pepper Potts (Gwyneth Paltrow). I do not know if Pepper has siblings called Plant, Paint and Yoghurt. We are not told. Pepper is in love with Tony, but doesn’t know it yet, just as Tony is in love with Pepper, but doesn’t know it yet. You always have to save something for further along in the franchise. Pepper and Tony are fond of glib repartee but neither Paltrow nor Downey Jr seem quite to have their heart in it. I like Downey Jr, usually, with his dark wounded eyes, but here his performance veers between going though the motions and a look which seems to say, ‘Hey, what film am I doing again?’ Anyway, his new mission is to avenge those who misuse his technology. No, he cannot just stop making the technology. He can’t do this because his mentor at Stark Industries, Obadiah Stane (Jeff Bridges), won’t let him. Obadiah has a bald pate and a beard (which always rings alarm bells in comic-book land) and makes Jeff look as if he might be wearing his head upside-down. Obadiah doesn’t want much from life; only global domination. (Don’t these people realise that there are still some places in the world where people don’t have any cushions at all?)

This is not a movie for those who like the birth of a superhero to be quick. You know, the bite of the radioactive spider; the blast of an infant to earth from another planet. This film is 120 minutes long and we don’t even get a glimpse of Iron Man proper until 80 minutes in. The get-up is cool, in its way, with its bits that blast fire here, and bits that blast fire from there, but it’s so impersonal it could just be a magnified toy from Woolworth’s. The whole thing just seems a bit sad and old and tired, and for sad and old and tired I really can just stay home. Believe me.