Robert Downey Jr is Iron Man, Ozzy

I actually went to see a movie on opening night last week: Iron Man. I’m not a fan of opening nights, generally—on Friday nights, movie theatres are crowded, fanboys are high on carbs, small children are screaming.

If I think a movie is likely to disappear within a week of release (either it’s really horrible or it has such a limited release nobody knows about it), I’ll go to a matinee that weekend. For the movies that seem to have enough buzz that I’m sure they’ll be around for weeks or months, I wait until at least the 2nd weekend to catch a matinee. Or I wait until the movie goes to the 2nd-run houses here in the city.

Iron Man is well worth the annoyance of going to a multiplex on Friday night in the city’s heart. The two morons who shouted out what they thought were funny things at the beginning of the movie eventually got into the flick and shut up—it was that good.

Robert Downey Jr. makes the movie work—he charms the audience with his portrayal of Tony Stark, a character with the same wild streak he has. The best casting decision of the popcorn movie season is casting Downey in this movie. They took the X-Men approach in casting good actors (as opposed to casting the prettiest people they could find), so the likes of Gwyneth Paltrow and Jeff Bridges fill out the cast. They also got around the faceless superhero problem seen in the Spiderman movies by showing Tony Stark inside the costume (making the costume another foil for Stark’s wit).

The script was written not as a fanboy superhero movie, but as a character-based action flick featuring a protagonist who happens to become a superhero. The filmmakers (Marvel Studios in their first step away from collaborations with movie studios) were smart enough to realize that the drawing power of the comic book heroes is not the fighting and explosions (as cool as they may be) but the writing. DC may have created some of the iconic superheroes of the 1950’s and 60’s, but Marvel was king in the 70’s because they caught the post-Vietnam, post-Watergate mood and created flawed and complex heroes. Spiderman, the X-Men, the Hulk, even the bland Fantastic Four, all had their doubts, fears, prejudices. The Superman comic bored me when I was a kid, frankly. An invincible hero saves the world—you knew a chunk of kryptonite was just waiting around the corner.

Where superhero movies succeed or fail is not in how spectacular the effects are or how many villains they fight at the same time—it’s the writing, stupid. Are the characters interesting? Is the story compelling? Most of the time, Hollywood gets it wrong and thinks the visual spectacle is more important. Maybe it is to some people, but the power of storytelling is stronger than that of the visceral thrill. Compare the tepid stories and weak characters in the Fantastic Four movies to the stronger choices made in the telling of the X-Men or Spiderman, or, similarly, Superman Returns to Boredom versus Batman Begins to Not Suck.

So… Iron Man moves to the top of my favourite superhero movies list. Sadly, it displaces one of the best Channel 101 series I’ve ever seen….