Iron Man - Review

By the end of his film Jon Favreau’s Iron Man is a light and fluffy character, a superhero colored in with bright bits of crayon, but he doesn’t start out that way. Ironically it’s early on in the story when Tony Stark, the man inside the bright red suit, is still a carefree playboy and globe-trotting arms merchant that he has the most edge. It’s there that Favreau’s superhero movie works best, as Stark is captured by a group of terrorists known as the Ten Rings (nod to all you Mandarin fans), injured, and forced to work in a dank cave designing weapons.

Left with no choice Stark sets to work making killing machines as they demand, he just doesn’t make the killing machine his captors expect. Robert Downey Jr. is understated and complex as Stark, slaving away in the dust, working in secret for his own freedom under the threat of death, turning his grave injuries into triumph. Favreau seems to know that this early origin story is indeed the best part of his script, since he lingers on it, spending nearly half of his unexpectedly lengthy film on this well staged and acted setup.

If you’ve seen the trailers then you know that Stark eventually gets out of the cave and you know how he does it. It’s the kind of moment that’s bound to elicit cheers from the audience, and it doesn’t hurt that we know he’s kicking terrorist ass. Once he gets home, Stark sets about re-evaluating his role in selling weapons to the murderers of the world. Deciding he’s had enough of it, he puts his mind to the task of figuring out how to stop it. Tony Stark isn’t just a wealthy arms dealer, he’s beyond brilliant. We believe that this charismatic man, this wealthy inventor with an oversized ego, might really come up with this particular answer. His answer is Iron Man.

It’s there that the movie starts missing beats. We meet Tony Stark’s assistant, the plucky Pepper Potts, played by terribly miscast Gwyneth Paltrow. Their scenes together are agony, and often seem utterly misplaced, as if they belong in an entirely different movie. We meet Stark’s business partner and mentor, Obadiah Stone played by a bald and bearded Jeff Bridges. There’s nothing subtle about Stone, or any of the limply mysterious plot devices surrounding him. You know what he’s up to the minute you see his chrome dome. We meet Stark’s best friend Jim Rhodes, the best character in the film’s supporting cast. His role is limited, but Terrence Howard acquits himself well and leaves us wanting more of Rhodes.

And eventually we meet the movie’s obligatory villain, an uncreative, familiar riff on the notion that every superhero must face his exact opposite and equal. The Hulk must fight the Super Hulk. Superman must fight three Supermen. Iron Man must fight the Super Iron Man. It’s not very creative, and their final fight leaves something to be desired.

The problems are all in the second half of the movie, where Iron Man stops being different and settles for being ordinary and at times even silly. It becomes a well put together, well polished, but very standard, paint by numbers superhero origin story. There are no surprises, and even while it remains immensely entertaining that’s somewhat disappointing after the first half of the film where we sit down and get to know a man who describes himself as a merchant of death. I wanted to see how such an obvious villain becomes a hero, and the answer is apparently that someone simply flips a switch in the script.

Yet I don’t want to sound like I’m down on this movie. Iron Man is a lot of fun, especially for a superhero origin story, since they so often end up going awry. While I wasn’t blown away by the final battle between Iron Man and the film’s baddie, there are other great action sequences. Unlike most superheroes, Iron Man isn’t about stopping petty criminals or stalking city streets. His mission is global, and his big coming out party happens in a dusty Afghanistan village, saving villagers and farmers… where absolutely no one is looking. It’s the best action sequence in the entire film, and the place where you’ll want to cheer, even though there’s no over muscled robot for Iron Man to face off against.

It’s also refreshing to see a superhero flick in which the hero isn’t some angsty teenager or a borderline underwear model. Tony Stark is a mature man, with deep rooted flaws. Unfortunately, Favreau’s movie chooses to ignore most of them when things really get moving. My hope is that with this as a setup, we’ll get more of the screwed up egomaniac lurking inside Tony Stark’s helmet, and maybe even a more worthy, creative villain as well. The film is filled with all sorts of geeky references hinting at things to come. Iron Man is good enough that you’ll look forward to seeing them brought to fruition in whatever sequels drop from this tree.

Drillbit Taylor - Review

Drillbit Taylor is the story if three high school kids abused and beaten up by bullies. You’ve seen that before. What you haven’t seen before is what they decide to do about it, and I’m not just talking about hiring Owen Wilson.

Hiring Owen Wilson though, is step one. Wade (Nate Hartley) is skinny beyond all reason, Ryan (Troy Gentile) is a fat, short kid with a big mouth, and Emmit bears an unfortunate resemblance to a hyper-active hobbit. They’re instant targets for asshole upper classmen, and they have absolutely no hope of defending themselves. Finally sick of being pushed, shoved, punched, humiliated, and stuffed into things (including but not limited to each others’ shirts) they attempt to hire a bodyguard by placing an ad on the internet. They hire the only one they can afford, a guy named Drillbit Taylor who talks a good game, but unknown to them a few hours before was digging around in a dumpster. Drillbit is homeless and he’s only in it to milk enough money out of them for a plane ticket to Canada, where he believes his life will be nothing but roses and lollipops. If nothing else, there’s a good chance the streets he sleeps on will be cleaner.

You may think you have mapped out in your head where Drillbit Taylor goes from there, but Kristofor Brown and Seth Rogen’s script is full of surprises. This is not an Owen Wilson star vehicle, crafted to stick him in situations to be funny with kids. He does that, but Drillbit is more of a secondary character with Wade and Ryan as the movie’s leads. If you’ve seen Superbad, imagine Seth and Evan five years younger and rated PG. Rogen’s influence is obvious in the script, and he uses that same Superbad dynamic to tell a completely different story of friendship, and simple survival.

Luckily Nate Hartley and Troy Gentile are just as good at playing these characters as Michael Cera and Jonah Hill were, and while the script uses that same sort of chemistry the injection of Owen Wilson into it makes everything different. If there’s any problem with the movie it’s that it takes a little too long to get the point, and is at times tempted to spend too much time with Owen instead of the kids, who are the real story here. The setup feels as if it takes an hour, and while I understand that making up a reasonable excuse for a dirty, homeless whino to end up in a high school playing guard may take more explanation than the usual comedy MacGuffin, Drillbit Taylor takes too long to get to the point.

Once things get rolling though, Drillbit gels. We’ve seen so many of these movies about nerds standing up to bullies by now that it’s hard to believe anyone could find anything new in the genre, but Rogen and Brown do, and director Steven Brill and his cast deliver a comedy ass kicking.

Stardust - Review

In Stardust a young man named Tristran must save a woman who is actually a fallen star from an evil witch in a goat powered cart. Along the way he gets help from unicorns, gay pirates, and oh yeah he may just be a long lost prince. Even for a fantasy movie, Stardust is made of pretty silly stuff. In a way it’s a throwback to what fantasy movies were before Peter Jackson, reminiscent of now rather dated work like Willow, Legend, or The Dark Crystal. But inspired directing from Matthew Vaughn and a wry sense of humor saves the movie’s oh-so-80s story from being an out of time curiosity and makes it a completely unique fantasy film unlike any of the other witches and wizards fare flooding theaters.

Matthew Vaughn by the way, was the guy who infamously wrote an X-Men 3 script in seven days and was slated to direct the third mutant film before being replaced by playboy director Brett Ratner. If only Fox had kept him, X-Men 3 might not have been such a disaster. Unlike Ratner, Vaughn has talent and style to spare and it’s all on display in Stardust. He never settles for doing things the easy way, and the movie is filled with glowing, gorgeous wide shots and massive, world-spanning pans in which his camera zooms from a tiny village across thousands of miles, through a castle and into a keyhole. Vaughn’s take on the universe first created by Neil Gaiman in book form is absolutely breathtaking.

His cast is stacked with big names. The movie’s lead is the only face in it you won’t recognize. Charlie Cox plays Tristran, a shop boy from our world who crosses a magical wall and finds himself ensnared in a world of magic and intrigue. He’s instantly likable, if a little dopey, and plays the part of an adventurous romantic out to win the heart of the woman he loves admirably. Claire Danes plays one of the film’s female leads, a fallen star named Yvaine, and she works as a sassy, ethereal beauty. But Robert DeNiro as an air pirate is just bizarre. The character is funny and likable, but only because he’s written that way not because of anything DeNiro is doing. DeNiro, seems rather lost, as if he’s standing on set in front of a green screen unable to figure out which way he’s supposed to be facing. Sienna Miller is a waste of space as Tristran’s lady love Victoria, but thankfully she’s barely in the film. Michelle Pfeiffer seems to be having a blast as the rapidly aging head witch who harries Tristran on his trip.

Somewhat confusing is Ian McKellan serving as the movie’s narrator. Don’t get me wrong, McKellan’s great. There is no better narrator than Ian McKellan, not even Morgan Freeman. But why does the movie have an omniscient narrator at all? It does give the film a nice dreamlike, storybook quality; but it’s almost as if Vaughn felt Gaiman’s story too bizarre to be understood by audiences without someone there to offer explanations. Actually, he may have been right.

Stardust is really weird, but knows it and seems to have no problem poking fun at itself and the fantasy genre for just how strange it all is. That wickedly sarcastic sense of fun, more than anything, is what makes Stardust such an entertaining success. It’s unlikely to become the next big fantasy franchise, but it’s a great way to spend a Friday night. Gaiman’s world looks good on screen, and it’s impossible not to enjoy spending time with it.

Hot Rod - Review

Hot Rod stars the best thing modern ‘Saturday Night Live’ has going in Any Samberg, in another one of those awful Lorne Michaels produced scripts. Though it’s not directly based on any specific ‘SNL’ sketch, Hot Rod is more in the vein of The Ladies Man or Night at the Roxbury than Mean Girls, the last time Michaels did anything good.

Samberg stars as Rod, a wannabe stuntman and I suspect, Napoleon Dynamite’s older brother. Like Napoleon Dynamite, the movie is more about laughing at Rod than laughing with him, and there’s plenty to make fun of him for, even if it’s not necessarily funny. Rod’s a pretty pathetic figure, a loser who lives at home with his parents and doesn’t seem to realize he’s an adult. The guy has nothing going for him, and walks through life in a perpetual fog, failing at stunts and crashing in to things. Rod has only two dreams: The first is to become a world famous stuntman. The second is to kick his step-father’s ass. Unfortunately, his second dream is put in jeopardy when he discovers his step-father will die unless someone raises $50,000 for a heart transplant his insurance won’t cover. Rather than calling Michael Moore, Rod decides to jump over 15 buses to raise the money necessary to save his step-dad, so he can beat him to death.

Unfortunately even though the idea of a guy trying to save his father’s life so he can punch him in the face is kind of a funny, Hot Rod doesn’t seem to know what to do with it. The movie resorts to ripping off gags and jokes from other people and doesn’t seem to be able to come up with anything on its own. Rod’s failed stunts are a direct descendent of the stuff Super Dave Osborne was doing on his TV show twenty years ago, and they haven’t gotten funnier with age. The movie rips off dialogue jokes from other sources, for instance there’s a bit in which Samberg riffs with one of his friends on words that start with “wh” which I watched done on ‘Family Guy’ rerun the night before. There’s no way they came up with that on their own. It’s literally just copied from Seth MacFarlane’s show and pasted into the movie. They don’t even try to put their own spin on it.

There are a few laughs in the film, but even those are usually weird homage’s to 80s music videos or bizarre, random rehashes of techniques used in Samberg’s SNL Digital Shorts. I suppose we should consider ourselves lucky that they didn’t try to work a “Dick in a Box” remix in. Actually, scratch that. That might have helped. That song’s just funny, no matter how many times you hear it.

The supporting cast is even more lost than Samberg. Isla Fisher, who was brilliant earlier this year in The Lookout, doesn’t even seem to know that she’s in a movie. It’s never clear why her character is hanging around with a loser like Rod, and she seems just as confused on that subject as we are. Fisher mostly stands around and gives Samberg blank stares, as if she’s forgotten all of her lines and is hoping that if she’s really still no one will notice.

As a comedy, Hot Rod is a big waste of time. Most of the problem is Pam Bady’s script, which sucks and Samberg, who really doesn’t belong in this script even if it was any good. Though there’s not much to work with here, director Akiva Schaffer does a great job shooting the film and uses his camera to find occasional comedy using some great visual cues, even when there probably is nothing to laugh at. Despite his best efforts, there’s really nothing he or anyone else could have done to make Hot Rod good, except to light the whole thing on fire and put it in a paper shredder.