I AM THAT I IRON MAN

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    Who am I? How do I fit into this cosmic cornucopia? What is the meaning of existence? For thousands of years, philosophers have avoided having to get real jobs by debating these things over tea, coffee, and the occasional gulp of hemlock. For Socrates, the unexamined life was not worth living. Hobbes theorized that men were selfish by nature, and a powerful absolute ruler was a necessary evil. To Calvin, the evil was homework. Renee Descartes said, "I think, therefore I am." For multi-billionaire industrialist Tony Stark, though, the answer is "I clink, therefore I Iron Man."

    Actually, it's more like "I drink, drive, play a lot of blackjack, build a lot of bombs, screw anything that has two breasts and winks at me, realize it would be a lot more fun to blow shit up in third world countries for the common good -- and then clink, therefore I Iron Man."

    Aha. I thought that would get your attention. It's good to know that Kant, Hume, and Nietzsche are still minor draws, but the thought of watching trigger happy, Pashtun goat herders go off like fireworks (and accidentally set their own weapons piles ablaze with the embers of their sparkling corpses) still brings them in like nobody's business. Add a six-foot, steel dildo with rocket packs to the mix, and now you're talkin' 'bout a good time! Sound like the sort of down to earth philosophy you can adhere to? Read on.

    For some, the wait may have been too long. For others, you might be wondering, "Who the hell is this iron-clad-poet-warrior-philosophotron anyway? And why am I still reading this while Top Chef is on?" I realize some of you may have been forced at early ages to read hardcover books without pictures in them. I'm sorry. I can't do anything about that. Disown your parents and seek solace in the sweaty kiosks of your local comic-con, then we'll talk and, hopefully, heal. Fortunately, I grew up in a world where comics still packed the shelves, because all game consoles were 8-bit and the internet was but a glint in the porn industry's eye. So here's a refresher . . .

    Iron Man is the story of Tony Stark, a multibillionaire-CEO-inventor-genius guy who built a metallic power suit and uses it to fight injustice, anarchy, and rising interest rates. "Not bad," you're saying, "I can see that as a career opportunity for me." So why not an early 80s Richard Donner-style Superman-type movie? Well, one was in the works. But in the original comic Stark was captured in Vietnam and forced to build his suit while in captivity, only to escape later in a blaze of anti-Commie glory. This brought the whole thingamajig a little too close to Sylvester Stallone's tiny independent thriller at the time. So plans to call the new superhero movie Can-bo had to be scrapped (along with their alternate title, Rambot: First Lube). Fast forward to the Tim Burton Batman years. and everything seemed prime for ironing. But after years of patient retooling, Iron Man's production team could only stand aside and watch, in horror, as Shaquille O'Neal's Steel was set loose upon an unsuspecting public like an errant spark in a fission chain reactor. The result? The entire comic book movie genre wiped out in a single radioactive blast. The fallout was devastating, with Shaq only escaping court ordered execution by fleeing to France and shacking up in a time-share chateau with Roman Polanski. Following eight straight days of national mourning, President Clinton declared before a joint session of Congress that the comic book movie could be rebuilt. By 2001, Spider-man and X-men had pushed through the ashes, and the comic book movie was here to stay . . . only now wiser and wearier for having suffered under the bald headed, seven-foot, cross-eyed Pandora's box of an All Time NBA MVP player with marginalized free throwing ability.

    Finally, the world seemed ready, and studio executives everywhere were humming a familiar tune . . .

Iron Man! Iron Man!
Does whatever an Iron Man can!
Can he fly with CGI?
For a price! Buy the rights!
Look out!
Here comes the Iron Man!


    So here we are, in yet another pyrotechnic pair of Marvel's flashy, cinematic super-shorts. And what a show it is. The film opens with Robert Downey Jr. as Stark, a rich, arrogant, media whore who spends the bulk of his chaperoned Humvee ride drinking, smoking, drinking, drinking, signing autographs, and hitting on chicks (while drinking). At this point I wondered if I hadn't just accidentally walked in on the Robert Downey Junior Story by mistake. I asked my brother, and he didn't know. So we got up and walked around the Cineplex for awhile and ducked in and out of screenings, until we were convinced that, yup, indeed, we were in the right movie. Once we returned, we found out that Stark had been captured by Afghani warlords or Cobra or something, and is being forced to build one of his own company's super missiles for them. Complicating things is the fact that Tony's got Talibani shrapnel taking the I-94 Business Loop to his heart. Fortunately, his cell mate, Yinsen (Shaun Toub), was able to rig a coffee filter and a car battery to a big hole in his chest, giving him superhuman strength and premium French Roast on the hour every hour. Together, they concoct a brilliant plan to get out alive. They'll build their own weapon just outside of camera range! Ingenious! And the next twelve hours of screen-time is spent watching Stark and Yinsen play arts and crafts with deadly explosives.

Iron Man! Iron Man!
Does whatever an Iron Man can!
Can he smelt? Yes he can!
Once again and without end.
I'm bored!
Might as well hit the can.


    Now, I must confess that I've always had a bias towards inventors. Ask me as a kid who my favorite comic book characters were, and odds are I'd say Batman, Spiderman, and Iron Man, cause they designed their own wares. Favorite Ninja Turtle? Donatello. Favorite Rescue Ranger? Gadget. And no, that has nothing to do with my unhealthy fetish for field mice (but thanks for asking; really, I appreciate your concern). With that said, even I have to admit that this whole montage of Stark hammering and sweating and sweating and hammering and using his sweat to smelt more steel to make another hammer to go on hammering and sweating just goes on way too long. It's like porn for steel workers.

    Eventually, the terrorists suspect that the perspiring duo are building a time-traveling DeLorean, and they're only going to get the shiny bomb casing filled with used pinball machine parts. So they bust in, but not before Stark busts out in his brand new thermonuclear underwear. Can I get another theme song?

Iron Man! Iron Man!
Does everything that an Iron Man can!
Can he build a nuclear powered heat resistant bullet proof rocket suit made out of a titanium alloy in the confines of an Afghani prison and then use that to take on an army of 963 insane mullahs before destroying their weapons cache in a blaze of fiery death and ejecting himself into the middle of the Gobi desert where he can survive a 5,000 ft. free fall into hot pounding sand?
Yes he can!
Unlikely, man. Improbable Man.
Look out!
The writers were on crack!


    Once back home, he ditches his old electro-coffee filter heart for a new model -- this one makes espresso! Then he starts building a new suit. It's during this time that he has one of those existential Zen Satori moments when he realizes, 'Wow, I've been using my company to sell weapons of mass destruction to complete sociopaths, while all this time "I" could've been the complete sociopath and blown these guys' nuts off myself, thus eliminating the middle-man and cutting down on overhead costs.' In a stunning move, he announces that Stark Enterprises is getting out of the weapons biz, which rubs the freakishly hairless skull of his partner, Obadiah Stane (Jeff Bridges), the wrong way. At the same time, his woefully undernourished executive assistant mother-slave, Pepper Potts (Gwenyth Paltrow), starts to fall for him. This only gets more complicated when his military buddy, Jim Rhodes (Terrence "I am not Cuba Gooding Jr." Howard) suspects him of covering up his miraculous escape. And if that wasn't enough, Al-Qaeda puts the troubled exec on their Most Fascinating People to Kill list.

    From here, the story could go any number of directions, all culled from the comic book's rich legacy. For this outing, they decided on a corporate takeover scheme. Now, for those of you who never read the comic, this happens -- oh -- let's say every other issue. Seriously, this was the Wall Street of Marvel. Greed was good, and you couldn't go four pages without some corporate goon setting his sights on Iron Man's adamantium assets. Ted Turner, Dick Cheney, Rupert Murdoch, Simon Cowell, Willy Wonka -- everyone wanted a piece of Stark's pie, and every eewy innuendo that conjures up.

    My personal favorite was a six-partner where Iron Man went mano y mano with Bill Gates. It was a helluva fight. Iron Man in his suit; Bill in his triple-layered sleek titanium desktop -- with rocket powered compact disc launchers, 26 gigabyte missile hold, and nuclear powered Pentium processor. Bill would've nearly had the upper hand, but on startup his suit failed to launch Windows XP, and the next five issues were spent watching Iron Man pummel him into a small Chinese medicine ball. To be fair to Bill, he did actually get a copy of his Error Report sent out to Microsoft's Troubleshooters in time. However, not knowing it was from the boss, they printed it out, pooped on it, and force-fed it to Steve Jobs' kidnapped terrier, Wally. (Microsoft Standard Operating Procedure.)

    Needless to say, Obadiah doesn't share Stark's newfound existentialism and wants to take over the company. So Stark does the only sensible thing a shrewd businessman would do: he slyly diverts his assets to a tax-free offshore fund, then goes private with a $4.9 billion leveraged buyout (which he wisely staged before a three year market correction), and accrues interest as high as 18 percent on a $3 billion debt, which sours the milk for Stane and forces the Board to vote for Chapter 11, which paves the way for a deal with S.E.'s licensee in Japan, thus giving him some creative autonomy in Shinmaywa's restructured S.E.-Nippon subsidiary and, fortuitously, a more diverse portfolio. Then he flies in a giant killer Threepio suit to an Afghani village and pumps a dozen Talibani warlords full of lead, a mere prelude to blowing up a large weapons cache and scuttling a couple of America's fastest F-22 fighters.

I should note that the movie chose to follow that last point the most closely, but the rest is to be assumed (and I'm sure will be included on the Special Edition DVD).

    Having made the world a safer place for poor Afghani opium farmers, he returns home to his Malibu palace. There he's greeted by the glass encased gifted remains of his old coffee filter-ticker, sporting the plaque: "Proof that Tony Stark has a heart ~ Ms. Potts." Really? You think so? A heart? I mean, come on, Ms. Potts. I like to give people the benefit of the doubt just like the next guy, but it looks to me like the only thing Tony has a heart for is blowing shit up. Hell, all he did was switch one set of enemies for another. It's still the same crackerjack ideology. Tony says he just wants to "help" people. And if he can help people separate their arms, legs, and torsos from their heads through flammable combustibles, even better. If that's all it takes, then Bin Laden is a fucking Care Bear. Probably the seldom mentioned Explodey Bear.

    Taking a page from Hamlet (or a cue from his earlier career), Robert Downey Jr. plays his later scenes as an insane public imbecile secretly masquerading a twisted genius and private guilt. Only Pepper catches on, and the two share an uncomfortable Peter Parker/Mary Jane Watson moment during a dinner benefit. There, on a window balcony, Stark stares at her with this pained look on his face that seems to ask, "If I stick my penis in her, will that make our work relationship untenable?" And she returns with a sly, polite nod that seems to say, "Why the hell haven't I been embezzling this guy's money all this time?" I won't tell you where any of this goes, but needless to say, their final scenes together make the awkward finale to Spider-man look like Gone With the Wind.

Iron Man! Iron Man!
Does whatever an Iron Man can.
Can he score? Not with her!
No he can't. He's not sure.
Look out!
Sexually Frustrated Man!


     Thankfully, a gooey, surly, unrestrained Jeff Bridges performance provides the perfect on-screen antidote for their failed chemistry. He returns to reap vengeance on Stark and a world that would allow a name like Obadiah Stane to exist in the first place. I mean, seriously, that's what you call your cleaning solvent! It doesn't help that he looks like Mr. Clean's evil twin -- sauntering around in his bald, goateed, Armani clad frame while promising to bring mass murder to dirt. But before declaring open war on mildew, he first has to steal Stark's heart while using some sonic-hypno device that plays Rick Astley's Never Gonna Give You Up at incredibly high frequencies. From there, he's free to use his own better, badder suit to launch the company's new marketing campaign: "Missiles don't kill people. Giant mechanical homicidal Obadiah-bots that kill people kill people."

    Fortunately, Stark wakes up and manages to find the old heart that Pepper had mounted and placed in glass. Unfortunately, she polished it with WD40 before sticking it in the case, so he can only run at 50% capacity. The resulting showdown between Stark's Iron Man Suit and Stane's Iron Monger Suit runs pretty much as you'd imagine it -- if you were an uninteresting Hollywood screenwriter. On the bright side, at least the finale gives us ample opportunity to apply the famed David Koepp Standard for Lame and Egregious Superhero Screenwriting (or DiKLESS, as I prefer to call it). And what is this standard? Why, it's the process wherein all modern superhero banter is judged when pitted against David Koepp's dialogue for the first Spider-man movie. So lines like, "Face it, Tony, my suit is more advanced in every way!" might receive a 5.2 on the DiKLESS scale. But they can't compare to the Green Goblin asking, "Are you in or out?" followed by Spider-man's reply, "It's you who's out Gobby! Out of your mind!" -- which scores a veritable 9.6 on the Koeppometer. As you can tell, the Koepp Standard works on inverse proportions, which means the higher the score, the more likely you'll be hearing bad dialogue. Fortunately for Iron Man, I tabulate the final tally at around 4.8 -- not the exactly Shakespeare, but it could've been a lot worse.

    As a whole, this film just sort of collapses in on itself like a large man stuck on his seventh plate at The Old Country Buffet. I call it Batman Begins syndrome: where hours of building up towards a climax just fizzles out because the filmmakers neurotically second-guessed themselves and didn't know what to do. It's like sex at Woody Allen's house. I'm sorry, but there's only so many loose ends you can tie up in one evening. I have no idea if that's what sex at Woody Allen's house is like, but if you do, I ask that you keep it to yourself.

    Part of the problem was Mark Fergus, Hawk Ostby, Art Marcum, and Matt Holloway apparently wrote this clunker in two competing installments, which director Jon ("I can't believe they let me go from Elf to this!") Favreau later spliced together. I'm told Casablanca was written the same way, which is why the original ending had Humphrey Bogart fighting Peter Lorre in a mechanical monkey suit while Ingrid Bergman looked on disparagingly, taking comfort in the arms of Sam the Piano Man who, it turns out, was really Hitler. I'll spare you what they did with Claude Rains and just say that this sort of thing shouldn't be attempted, cause it messes up what is otherwise a good movie.

    And that's the thing. This isn't a bad movie. Sure, you have to get over the shaky moral precept that the only way to fight the proliferation of violence is to be more violent yourself. But once you get past that one small little detail, it's pretty entertaining to watch. Then again, so is a street fight.
So if you enjoy watching street fights (and who doesn't?), I highly recommend Iron Man! And if you enjoy watching street fighters, I highly recommend the film, Street Fighter, starring Jean Claude Van Damme and Raul Julia. Actually, on second thought, I wouldn't. Van Damme's au jus dripping Antwerpian accent makes Robert Downey Jr.'s insane rant-o-babbles sound like an NPR edition of Night at the Opera. And Raul Julia's lilting Latin jungle general? Makes Jeff Bridges look like a Rogaine shunning He-man.

    No. Best to stick with Iron Man.

    Sure, I don't think Locke, or Hume, or Aristotle ever recommended building a giant metal condom to cure humanity's ills. But this is Tony Stark. And one played by Robert Downey Jr. at that. Really, I think we should give him an 'A-' for effort. He doesn't know any better. How could a man named Downey expect to? So long as he can occasionally soften my fabric and get those damned creases out of my khakis, I'm good. And if, someday, he sees the errors of his ways and turns around a builds a Surface to Air Meditation launcher, we can politely applaud and nod our heads approvingly, saying, "That'll do, Junior. That'll do." Though, when it lands on top of a throng of Chinese Riot Police and roasts them alive before they can play rubber bullet dodge ball with a host of Tibetan Monks, I'll run for the bomb shelters. Cause we're gonna have a major international incident on our hands -- and all those Iron Man parts?

Made in China.


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Trivia: Did you know the original screenplay had Stark's Iron Man taking on his father as Iron Monger? The original script pitted Iron Man and Monger atop the Stark Manufacturing Plant. There, Iron Monger says, "Obadiah never told you the truth about your real father." Stark then replies, "He told me enough! He told me you killed him!" To which Iron Monger says, "No, Stark, I AM YOUR FATHER." Stark then screams "Nooooooo" like a five year-old girl and plummets down a ventilation shaft, where he's quickly rescued by Pepper Potts, Jim Rhodes, and Chewie.
This was all part of a much bigger plot which pointed fingers at the Legislative-Military-Industrial complex. Unfortunately, this never panned out because studio execs proclaimed the original cuts of the script to be too anti-American. This is because most Hollywood movie moguls subscribe to the clinically unproven theory that Americans have no brain cells, and thus, shouldn't be forced to choose what they like. What a shame.

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The Other Guy with the Glasses is the older, wiser, improbably handsomer brother of the unexplainably successful, perplexingly unmedicated spaz, That Guy with the Glasses. A contributing writer for The Nostalgia Critic and various other Glasses sketches, he enjoys watching bad movies, TV shows, and other things ad executives freaked him out with as a child. He also lends his hands filming and offering unsolicited creative advice in the editing department. A cinematic social crusader, he writes to silence the screams inside after having seen Shaquille O'Neal's Kazaam