So in a rare event, I actually went to see a movie opening weekend this Saturday. It was, of course, Iron Man 2. Despite the lukewarm reviews, I thought it was pretty good. Of course, I long ago gave up hopes of films blowing me out of the water. So my bar was set fairly low, and the film exceeded that. I’d say it was a solid three or three and a half star movie, which is more than I’d probably give the vast majority of modern films.
Part of it is that it didn’t outwear its welcome. The movie runs about two hours, which today is (sadly) fairly lean. Purely at random I looked up Transformers 2; that ran two and a half hours. TWO AND A HALF HOURS. For Transformers 2! Seriously, what the hell is that about? And I recently noted elsewhere, the disaster flick 2012 was longer than the ‘50s versions of When Worlds Collide and War of the Worlds combined.
The scenes of uber-capitalist Tony Stark as a private individual telling a sleazy senator to kiss his ass was a greatly satisfying opening. I mean, that’s not something you see in modern films once a year, or maybe five or ten years. The action was fun, and again, didn’t overstay its welcome. The film wasn’t brilliant by any means, but it moved fast enough that I didn’t pick at plot holes, as I surely would have done were it twenty or thirty minutes longer.
The cast was good, except for Scarlet Johannsson. Really, you can’t hire an actress who would even TRY a Russian accent? Boo! (And don’t say, “she looked good in an catsuit.” Hollywood has a zillion actresses who would look good in a jumpsuit.) Sam Rockwell way overplayed his villain role, albeit presumably at director Favreau’s request.
Set against that was Downey, Jr., though, who really just inhabits Tony Stark. Nick Fury gets an actual role this time, and the part was literally written for Samuel L. Jackson, who runs with it. I loved all the nods to the Marvel films as a single unit, such as when they dig out what is clearly a prototype for Captain America’s shield from Howard Stark’s effects. Presumably the elder Stark will play a role as a young man in the Cap movie next summer.
And then there’s the now traditional post-credit teaser. I had this delirious sensation when I saw it, as it really came home that the exact films I’d been dreaming about since I was a kid are coming into being, and in pretty much exactly the way I’d like them to. Short of an actual Godzilla vs. Gamera movie, this is as good as it will ever get for me. And the thought of Iron Man, Thor and Cap (I assume they’ll move the discovery of his frozen body up a bit for the movie) fighting the freakin’ Hulk makes me giddy. It’s be nice seeing Iron Man fighting a non-armored foe, actually.
(Speaking of the upcoming Thor movie, when I saw that bootlegged still of the freakin’ Destroyer, one of my all-time favorite Thor villains, hit the web I about fell over. My expectations of that film working jumped about 500%.)
Coincidentally, when I went over to my brother’s house the next day, he had rented the recent Sherlock Holmes movie. Frankly, I didn’t think much of it. As opposed to Stark, Downey didn’t really inhabit Holmes particularly well. I understood that this was the ‘80s action hero version of Holmes and Watson, and it wasn’t so much the sheer fact that these weren’t Doyle’s characters that annoyed, as the fact that the new versions just weren’t particularly interesting.
Irene Adler was a big problem. The insistence of modern films to turn every subsidiary female character into a butt-kicking action heroine, from Adler to Maid Marian to Zeta Jones in the Zorro flicks, I just find tiresome. And giving her and Holmes an explicitly sexual relationship just misses who Holmes is. Again, it’s not so much that they changed Holmes, but that this version is so uninvolving.
As with most modern action films (see Iron Man notes above), the film was too long for no reason whatsoever (it’s actually about the same length as Iron Man 2, but sure seems longer), and the CGI tool box was used to give us all sort of pointless huge panoramas of steam-era London. Here’s the thing; people lived much more proscribed, parochial lives in those days. They didn’t tend to see the world, or think of it that way, from a godlike vantage. Thus these cityscapes might be more ‘realistic’ in some fashions, but they are utterly incorrect from a psychological standpoint, and again seek to deny the fact that the world in the past was a very, very different place.
The cult stuff, used to bring in a touch of the fantastic to the proceedings, was oddly the same gambit used by Young Sherlock Holmes. And the mystery element was really poorly done. When Holmes Reveals All at the end of the movie (for no real reason, given the set-up), they just cut in inserts of stuff he saw but didn’t comment on earlier in the movie, and then we just have to take Holmes’ word as to their significance.
I’ve seen worse, but I really would have zero interest in seeing another go around with these guys, even on home video.
