One of the better superhero franchises returns with the standard baggage of all superhero franchises
by Jack Kentala
It’s easy to bemoan sequels, especially for the so-called “superhero” franchise films. For comic fans, there are innumerable changes to the coveted Lore for the sake of making a compelling hour-and-a-half to two-hour movie, laden with ret-conning and character compositing and various rejiggerings that muddy the pure waters of the diehard. For the adult populace seeking to watch something slightly more entertaining than reality TV, there’s the barrier of the PG-13 rating, which requires all possible grittiness and swearing and sex to getting sanded down to something harmless enough for the 14-year-old boys in attendance, not to mention the latter usually resulting in a lowest-common-denominator, playing-to-the-moronic-masses dumbing-down of most everything. And for anyone just trying to enjoy a damn film, there’s the product placement, the unwieldy comic relief, and the nagging suspicion that they’re watching a two-hour commercial for action figures.
Rather miraculously, Iron Man has proved itself to be one of the more tolerable, watchable franchises, which I’ll just go ahead and say I believe is entirely the result of the inspired choice of casting Robert Downey Jr. and getting micro-indie (circa Swingers) turned big-budget writer-actor-director Jon Favreau to helm the show. Amazing how Favreau went from slumming it with the criminally-underseen, Swingers-spiritual-successor, small-budget mob movie Made to a gargantuan, multi-unit, multi-million moneybag like Iron Man in around fifteen years, which is about the equivalent of fifteen minutes in gated Hollywood.
