Not a review of Iron Man 2

I like to write about all sorts of things, but after I’ve gone and they clear out all the Black And Red notebooks I accumulated over my lifetime, and all of the futuristic storage media I am still to adopt, they won’t be finding the reviews I wrote about early 21st century films. For one thing, I can’t get my head around the style required. Of necessity, reviews are a personal response to some kind of art, and yet perversely, reviews are by convention impartial sounding and avoid the use of the ‘I’. That seems a bit fraudulent to me. The other problem is that no review has ever helped me make a good decision about what to watch. For example, I love the comedy film Shallow Hal which was universally panned by the critics, and have never enjoyed a single foreign language film (in fact, I haven't even stayed awake through a whole one). With all that in mind, I’m now going to give you my thoughts on the film Iron Man 2.


I have to be upfront about this, Iron Man 2 is not a film I would have chosen. I may have been slightly handicapped because I hadn’t seen Iron Man 1 (I’m guessing that there was one). Nick took me as a special treat, after he had gone with me the other weekend to see Nanny McPhee 2. In spite of the lack of popcorn due to the ongoing slimming campaign, I was up for it. I’ve quite likes some graphic novel based films, Spiderman was Ok, Superman was good…erm I’m sure that I’ve sat through others, I just can’t remember them. If you fancy it, I’d say go see Iron Man 2. It has special effects, fight scenes, costumes, bad science, Gwyneth Paltro and another slim and pretty female character. These are the essentials of the genre as I understand it.

Here comes the however - I feel it needs capitalisation, but I won't -
I was on the side of the baddie.
That’s not supposed to happen. Graphic Novels always have a well defined goodie, and a baddie, and so do the spin off films. In this one though, the goodie was deeply objectionable, seeming to represent the worst aspects of decadent capitalism. The Russian character who it seemed was intended to be the baddie at least had good reason for his actions, and was only intent on making the goodie suffer which was almost fair enough as he deserved it. There was another baddie, a weedy, stupid, manipulative type, which made no sense as he was also a wealthy industrialist and those characteristics don’t get anyone that far (though they might get you to entry level management at B&Q). The female characters were poorly defined, tough-but-submissive-sexy-power dressers, which is fair enough in this context. I started to think that maybe the goodie baddie thing was intentional in a subtle, subversive, arty way. I was wrong to think that though. It was clear from the ending I was supposed to like the goodie, even though the baddie liked his parakeet.

Reviews end with a recommendation: to see, or not to see. I did that bit earlier on. Sorry.





(Unless you know you’ll like it, don’t bother, that’s what I really think).