There’s a line in “Iron Man” that perfectly encapsulates the film. Six words, which happen to be the last six, that tell you everything you need to know about the latest spring blockbuster about a masked avenger. Six words that practically spit in the face of their predecessors and the rules that they live by. These six words are so organically rebellious that they couldn’t have been read off of a piece of paper, only spoken by a flesh and blood person. Until the very end, Robert Downey Jr. towers over this film, over the costume and the special effects, carrying the entire genre somewhere it hasn’t been before.
What Downey Jr. has done is make the character his own. While great actors have been recruited to bring their beloved superheroes to life, most have been little more than seat warmers. When Tobey Maguire started posturing after the success of the first “Spider-Man” film, the studio countered by threatening to replace him with Jake Gyllenhaal. While Maguire gave solid performances as Peter Parker, it’s doubtful that “Spider-Man 2” would have suffered with someone else in the role.
If anyone but Robert Downey Jr. dons the suit in “Iron Man 2” (well, besides Terrence Howard), the film won’t suffer, it will fester. Of course, Downey Jr. nails the charmingly obnoxious side of Tony Stark. What sets his performance apart is the total understanding he seems to have of the Stark who has just had his eyes opened to the destruction that has been wrought in his name. He is a man who feels he has a tremendous debt he has to pay to society and Downey Jr. gives a sense of gravity to this hero that is missing from his peers.
And it’s a good thing that Downey Jr., along with his excellent supporting cast, is so good, because this is a flawed film. There is an excessive amount of expository dialogue forced in throughout, highlighted by a reporter obligatorily telling Stark what his company is doing behind his back, at a black-tie fundraiser, no less. And for an action film, there’s not a whole lot of action. The final throw-down between Iron Man and his nemesis starts off strong, showing the robot-on-robot action that was missing from “Transformers,” with the two throwing each across freeways and using passing cars as weapons, but they run out of steam after just a couple of minutes.
Besides Downey Jr.’s award-worthy performance, the best thing “Iron Man” has going for it is its future. This isn’t the last we’ve seen of Tony Stark. If history’s taught us anything, he’ll be back in two years with more focus. There are many similarities between “Iron Man” and the first “Spider-Man” movie, from the paint-by-numbers plot to the arbitrary action scenes, and “Spider-Man 2” is the one comic book movie that deserves to be called a film. And that didn’t have Robert Downey Jr.
