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From SeeingBlack.com Movies/TV
It turns out that Robert Downey, Jr. is perfect in the role of this comic book-turned-movie hero. While the original Iron Man was created by a team headed by Stan Lee in the early 1960’s, and modeled after the eccentric recluse millionaire Howard Hughes, the movie version updates Iron Man for today and makes him a prodigy electronics and engineering genius who takes over his father’s multi-million-dollar weapons business, Stark Industries. It is through the business that Tony Stark gets the parts and technology to create a state-of-the-art armor that makes him into a superhero. This is superhero status attained through a first-class education and, like that of Batman, through lots of wealth and spare time. The comic book Iron Man grappled with the Vietnam War. Today’s Iron Man mixes it up in the Middle East—in the forgotten war in Afghanistan. Downey perfectly portrays the obnoxious, privileged Stark, who lives in a crazy spot in Malibu, owns several cars, owns at least one plane and is a notorious womanizer. To top it all off, there is thinly disguised sexual tension between him and his assistant, who has a comic book name if there ever was one—Pepper Potts. Played by Gwyneth Paltrow, Potts is well educated, has perfect manners and manages to outrun the bad guys while wearing a dress and six-inch heels. This particular vibe of the 60’s playboy/law enforcer—the same vibe that brought us the likes of James Bond and Shaft—is only annoying until you start laughing at it. And there is enough flavor of that other 60’s secret agent—the doofus Max Smart in “Get Smart”— to help us not take Tony Stark or Iron Man so seriously. He’s a man. He’s only a man. For sure, there are many of us tired of seeing the new stock villains of cinema that do appear in “Iron Man”—people of Middle Eastern descent. There is one scene that it seems director Jon Favreau and writers Mark Fergus and Hawk Ostby could not resist. When Iron Man first comes on the scene, a group of dark natives in Afghanistan, outfitted with machine guns approach his area with the kind of fear that makes their eyes wide and then makes them scatter like the best of Stepin Fetchit. (These are just the first hapless dark natives of the summer blockbuster season. Based on the trailers, we can expect more next month in the highly anticipated sequel: “Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull.”) Even with this sort of routine racial profiling, “Iron Man” offers some equal opportunity to Whites to be villains and for Blacks (Terrence Howard as an Air Force officer) to be the so-called heroes. By making Tony Stark capable of a second thought and remorse, “Iron Man” does question militarism, war and the ultimate worth and purpose of deadly weapons sold for millions in profit. This review also appeared on Tom Joyner's BlackAmericaWeb.com,/i> You can order Esther Iverem's critically praised We Gotta Have It: Twenty Years of Seeing Black at the Movies, 1986-2006 (Thunder’s Mouth Press, April 2007)at Amazon.com or purchase at your favorite bookstore. It makes a wonderful gift! Thanks! Read and search hundreds of reviews on SeeingBlack.com's Movies/TV channel and archive. Click here to post a comment or your own review. © Copyright by SeeingBlack.com |
