Previewing Iron Man - and Summer 08.

"With its dusty Humvees, violent Afghan battlefields, and worries about the munitions business, the upcoming Iron Man is a film set firmly in 2008," writes Andrew Stuttaford in the New York Sun. "That'll do, I suppose, but what was wrong with 1963? If there's any tale that deserves the chance to return to the sheen, swank, and soul of its Rat Pack, space-age, pay-any-price-bear-any-burden origins, it's Iron Man's."

"Finally, someone's found a sure-fire way to make money with a modern Middle East war movie," writes Variety's Todd McCarthy. "Just send a Marvel superhero into the fray to kick some insurgent butt. The powerhouse comicbook-inspired actioner Iron Man isn't principally about this fantasy, but it won't hurt at least American audiences' enjoyment of this expansively entertaining special effects extravaganza." Also, Anne Thompson: "[I]f Iron Man delivers on the prognostications, the first summer blockbuster of 2008 will see several participants emerge with new cachet."

Updated through 5/2.

"You gotta love a middle-aged wreck as a superhero," writes the Hollywood Reporter's Kirk Honeycutt. "Iron Man may not make the A-list of Marvel Comics' stable - home to Spider-Man, X-Men and the Hulk - but he may be the cinema superhero for the rest of us.... Iron Man, the first self-financed production from Marvel Studios, should catch boxoffice lightning in a bottle, thanks to hiring longtime Marvel Comics reader Jon Favreau as director and the supersmart casting of Robert Downey Jr as the conflicted protagonist."

Robert Downey Jr's "charismatic performance holds Jon Favreau's film together when it threatens to lose its way between the crash-bang set pieces," writes the Evening Standard's Nick Curtis.

But Time Out's David Jenkins finds the whole thing "little more than an elongated, episodic and sporadically charming introduction to the life of this mechanised millionaire superhero, light on both CGI and moral quandaries, and possessing neither the zip and sparkle of a Spider-Man nor the brooding existential subtexts of Batman Begins."

"For its first 60 minutes (of a total of 126) Iron Man manages to overcome quite a few obstacles to become a surprisingly chirpy comic-book action movie," writes Yair Raveh.

Rachel Abramowitz has a long profile of Downey in the Los Angeles Times, where Cristy Lytal has a shorter one of creature effects supervisor Shane Mahan.

Earlier: "2008: Robert Downey Jr's Year."

"The summer of 2008 will feature an unusually deep bench of comic-book characters," write Lauren AE Schuker and Peter Sanders in a preview for the Wall Street Journal that comes equipped with an interactive thingy.

Previewing this summer's movies, the Telegraph's David Gritten notes that never before has an entire season, not just individual titles, been promoted as heavily in Britain. A 60-second trailer, for example, featuring flashes from 28 forthcoming movies, is playing in British theaters this weekend. Moviegoers with longer attention spans can also pick up a 16-page magazine - for free. And Will Lawrence recalls visiting the set of Speed Racer.

Gabriel Shanks surveys the season and decides: "The Good News: May is going to rock. The Bad News: The rest of the summer I should mostly read."

Updates, 27: In the New York Times, Michael Cieply takes a look at the bad boys of summer: "Businesses and business people remain some of Hollywood's most reliable villains. But the next crop of corporate heavies appears to have something attractive in its villainy. Perhaps that means a long-overdue acceptance by movie makers that at least some of those who pump oil, sell stock, run airlines and build our increasingly fuel-efficient cars are not completely without value."

In the Observer, Chrissy Iley talks with Harrison Ford about Indiana Jones and things in general.

The Oregonian's Shawn Levy talks with Jeff Bridges about Iron Man and more.

Updates, 4/28: "Every age gets not the superhero it deserves but the superhero it needs to ease its anxieties," proposes David Edelstein in New York: "the midwestern farm boy who conquers metropolitan crime; the caped vigilante of the Gotham night; the tortured teen whose sticky excretions become a source of potency; the persecuted freaks whose differences empower them to save the normal folks. Now, in Iron Man, the first of the season's megabudget comic-book spectaculars, we get an American weapons mogul whose guilt over facilitating the deaths of US soldiers and Mideast civilians impels him to turn off the arms pipeline and rescue Afghans from marauding warlords.... I loved it."

"Downey, who completely dominates the whooshing junk pile that is Iron Man is on his own wavelength, and he turns the movie into a hundred-and-eighty-five-million-dollar put-on," writes David Denby in the New Yorker. "Downey has a star's confidence now, and, if the audience takes to him, he could probably do this insouciant acting turn again. But it would be a bad joke on him - his most unfortunate mishap - if he winds up clanking around in a metal suit forever."

Film Threat presents its "2008 Summer Preview."

PopMatters launches its week-long preview of the summer.

Via Brainiac Joshua Glenn, the winning designs from Project Rooftop's contest calling for redesigns of Iron Man's armor.

A list from Peter Hartlaub: "Best and worst superhero movies."

Update, 4/29: "The problem with Iron Man is the script... or the utter lack thereof," writes David Poland. "But the suit is really, really, really cool." Karina Longworth comments.

"It's all designed to a tee, and nothing feels particularly risky," writes The Visitor at Twitch. "That said, Iron Man is really The Robert Downey Jr Show. Without him, the movie would be just another typical superhero picture."

For the Independent, Stephen Applebaum talks with Terrence Howard (Lieutenant Colonel Jim Rhodes/War Machine in Iron Man).

Updates, 4/30: "Iron Man is the first Marvel Comics superhero movie I would willingly sit through a second time," writes Premiere's Glenn Kenny. "This is the result not just of what the movie does, but what the movie doesn't do. One reason Iron Man doesn't suck as a Marvel adaptation is that it smartly sticks to the spirit of what made Marvel comics so entertaining during its 60s Golden Age."

"Forget about all the fantastic action," begins Scott Weinberg at Cinematical. "Dismiss the disarmingly smart, wry screenplay, and ignore the phenomenal supporting cast. Feel free to overlook the dozen components that make Jon Favreau's Iron Man the most uniquely entertaining superhero movie in a long time... I've got the one main reason that this flick is worthy of your two hours and ten bucks right here, and that reason is named Robert Downey Jr."

As for summer movies in general, at Twitch, Colin Armstrong looks back at "a few lavish productions which not only bombed but took something of (in my mind’s eye, anyway) an unfair critical drubbing."

Updates, 5/2: "Though Favreau remains best known for writing and co-starring in 1996's hipster totem Swingers, he honed his directing chops with a couple of richly imaginative, resolutely low-fi kids' movies, Elf and Zathura," writes Scott Foundas in the LA Weekly. "If the larger-scale, bigger-budget Iron Man never quite ascends to those heights of tinsel-and-string splendiferousness, it maintains Favreau's fondness for the handmade over the prefab, for Erector Sets over CRPGs. It's an exemplary comic book fantasia."

"Readers of movie reviews often think that critics hate the big Hollywood stuff and cherish only the little films about Romanian abortions or Iranian kids," writes Time's Richard Corliss. "But some of us, this one anyway, knows that there's an American style - best displayed in the big, smart, kid-friendly epic - that few other cinemas even aspire to, and none can touch. When it works, as it does here, it rekindles even a cynic's movie love. So cheers to Downey, Favreau and the Iron Man production company. They don't call it Marvel for nothing."

The New York Times' AO Scott finds Iron Man to be "an unusually good superhero picture. Or at least - since it certainly has its problems - a superhero movie that's good in unusual ways. The film benefits from a script (credited to Mark Fergus, Hawk Ostby, Art Marcum and Matt Holloway) that generally chooses clever dialogue over manufactured catchphrases and lumbering exposition, and also from a crackerjack cast that accepts the filmmakers' invitation to do some real acting rather than just flex and glower and shriek for a paycheck."

"It's difficult to imagine a better actor-character fit than that between Robert Downey Jr and Iron Man, the superhero who, out of all of comic book writer Stan Lee's creations, probably possesses the darkest of dark sides," writes the Washington Post's Ann Hornaday.

"We can win the war on terror, the movie suggests, with the force of Robert Downey Jr's personality alone," smiles Dana Stevens. More seriously, "The movie's central conflict, which is also Stark's internal one, has to do with the ambiguity inherent in waging war." Also in Slate, Grady Hendrix:

Even now, Iron Man represents Stan Lee's adolescent dog-eat-dog version of capitalism, the version that appeals to our "might makes right" monkey brains: Innovation is good; monopolies rock when we run them, suck when we don't; big corporations need CEOs rich enough to own space jets; and regulations should be a result of the CEOs' benevolence and wisdom, not imposed by outsiders. Tony Stark is a self-made man who believes that we can build ourselves out of trouble. He's one of America's romanticized lone inventors who, like Steve Jobs, solve problems by locking themselves away in secret workshops to emerge later with their paradigm-shifting inventions.

"[E]ven as Iron Man fulfills its genre obligations, it transcends them, thanks to lively direction by Favreau and, especially, the tour de force performance by Downey, who cements the comeback he's been building in such films as Zodiac, A Scanner Darkly, and (especially) as the bumbling hero of the criminally neglected Kiss Kiss Bang Bang," writes the New Republic's Christopher Orr. So "Stop Trying To Kill Robert Downey Jr!"

"There's chunkiness in the third act of Iron Man, and some of the characters are underwritten in Paramount's bid to make that all-important 126-minute mark," writes S James Snyder in the New York Sun. "But even in its closing moments, there's something fascinating about the way Mr Favreau takes a few steps back from the likes of Transformers, Fantastic Four and X-Men: The Last Stand. The world of Tony Stark is not one steeped in far-fetched fantasy, but in the dirt and sweat of hard labor. Iron Man is not a hero because of his gadgets, nor his intellect, but because of his work ethic."

"The ace up Iron Man's sleeve, quite unexpectedly, is Gwyneth Paltrow, who brings both radiance and gentle intelligence to the role of a glorified housekeeper called Pepper Potts," writes Tim Robey in the Telegraph. "How she takes out the laundry in those heels is beyond me, but she's a great sport for doing it, and her dry chemistry with our hero is worth a dozen atomic warheads."

For the Guardian's Peter Bradshaw, Iron Man is "a cheerful and unpretentious change to the current crop of war movies. At least at first. But I am sorry to say that it is guilty of the sneaky chauvinist trick of making the ultimate villain an American: a mannerism common to many Hollywood movies that cannot quite bring themselves to accord foreigners the status of effective enmity."

"If you're one of those literalists who has a hard time dealing with exploding planets, radioactive spiders or mutant genetics in your superhero movies, Iron Man may be right up your alley," writes Alonso Duralde for MSNBC. "While the big-screen debut of the armor-plated Marvel Comics hero may feature technology that's way ahead of reality, a very human heart beats within this souped-up action machine."

For the Independent's Robert Hanks, the film "is by the standard of superhero yarns unusually, even uniquely, thoughtful, witty and three-dimensional - a popcorn movie that has some of the satisfactions of a proper three-course meal."

"[T]here's simply not enough exhilarating slam-bang juice to the film, which bogs down in corporate intrigue when it should be putting its energy (and considerable budget) toward colossal clashes between Stark and his nemesis," argues Nick Schager in Slant.

Downey "gives his part of Tony Stark - the whiz inventor-mega-billionaire who converts himself into the clanking crusader Iron Man - a wit, passion, intensity and irony that light up the whole movie," writes Michael Wilmington at Movie City News.

"[A]lthough Downey spends a certain amount of screentime inside that suit, his face still carries the movie, giving it emotional weight," writes Salon's Stephanie Zacharek.

"Iron Man is the rare comic-book movie that makes the prospect of a sequel seem like a promise instead of a threat," writes Nathan Rabin at the AV Club.

"Solid and funk-free, Iron Man lovingly tosses American ego about like a cat with string, mixing things up just enough to remind us that, when we get down to what's really important, there isn't that much separating traditional red state muscle from blue state radicalism (among other factors, least of which are the deceivers and thieves among us)," writes Rob Humanick. "All within the space of a traditional nuts-and-bolts studio summer picture, that is - the area in which Jon Favreau's very-capable Marvel adaptation succeeds most broadly, its barely-hidden subtext deliberately de-politicized in favor of more a more universally guided moral compass."

"The ultimate male power one-man-show, Iron Man is less successful as political allegory than as sexual fantasia," writes Karina Longworth at the SpoutBlog.

Posted by dwhudson at April 26, 2008 3:15 PM