Film Carew: Iron Man 3

It's one of the iron-cast rules of boilerplate screenwriting: a superhero movie must end with two men in silly costumes, having a fistfight with the fate of the world in balance. But Iron Man 3 puts a slight wrinkle in the familiar, having Robert Downey Jr. and his Bob Geldof facial-hair inside his robo-suit, whilst Evil Genius Guy Pearce dukes it out in a short-sleeved navy shirt, some loose-cut cream slacks, sockless boat shoes, and with feathered-hair blow-dried back. It's not the only instant the flick dips into the murky waters of Neat Casual - Don Cheadle is a military commander of unlimited power clad solely in polo shirts coloured spearmint and lurid pale blue (Pantone 292?) - but it's certainly the most potent; suggesting that an essential white-collar criminal, even when his evil plan has kicked into full Take Over The World mode, wouldn't suddenly plump for PVC, but dance with the polycottons who brung him.

Pearce may become, literally, something resembling a fire-breathing-dragon by close, but only after climbing the corporate ladder: first a Hard Sci nerd on the shadowiest frontiers of R&D; then an erotic crypto-mystical brain-as-glowing-diorama salesman; then show runner for the film's faint of a bogeyman, The Mandarin, whose old-school racism and questionable Ben Kingsley casting and Figure Of Theatrical Terror angle - coming in hatcheted-up, ultra-fast Coming Soon teasers that suggest he's less an old-school terrorist, more a student of Danny Boyle - all make much more sense when they're revealed to be something of a joke (also, parenthetically, there's a blackmail-to-The-President(!) moment herein that totally, happily bites on the opening episode of Charlie Brooker's Black Mirror, sans the pig). This joke, essentially, comes at the expense of the comic book's own racist past, satirising the transparency of marshalling Yellow Terror to manipulate - to Oriental-Panic-monger - a vengeance-minded population into yearning for retribution, whether on line-drawn page or in the Islamic Middle East.

Pretty much everything, herein, is a joke, though. Written and directed by Shane Black, who worked with RDJ on the meta-action-movie black-comedy Kiss Kiss Bang Bang, Iron Man 3 meets every grave moment, every dramatic development, every brush with death, every reveal, every explosion, every world-is-on-the-brink-of-destruction instant as a place for a one-liner. There's the outright comedy of, say, the film's recurring run of clamouring fanboys, or its kitschy, zany bumble into a Miss Chattanooga pageant, or the most Blackian back-and-forth banter between Downey Jr. and the manifest trope of the Lovable Scamp, a single-mothered miscreant whose attempts to wheedle his way into Our Hero's affections are both comically manipulative and comically dismissed (“dads leave, it happens, no need to be a pussy about it”). But then there's the tiny moments, like when The President(!) is rescued mid-explosions-going-off-everywhere final showdown, and screeches like a girl when whooshed up into the air by Polo Don in iron suit; or the constant tenor of jokes about the transparent rebranding of Polo Don's iron suit from the War Machine to the Iron Patriot; or the fact that RDJ, Goop Paltrow, and Rebecca Hall realise (“do we need to worry about this?”) they're about to be hit by a missile when they see it live on TV.

"What do you mean you can't take me seriously with this hair?"

The most revered modern model of the man-in-silly-costume tentpole trilogy would be Christopher Nolan's take on The Batman, and a slew of superhero reboots have followed suit with the darkness and the grimness and the origin story flashbacks and so forth. But Iron Man 3 is pure froth, even moreso than its largely flippant predecessors. Just because it's the culminating episode in its trilogy doesn't mean it carries any weight, or gravity. A sequence in which Downey Jr, rocketman-ing about, must rescue 13 civilians hurtling from a blown-apart plane towards the Earth is superficially thrilling, but ultimately cartoonish, and carrying no real danger that anyone's actually going to die. Here, in the giddy unreality of the popcorn movie, Goopy P stands and watches a squadron of helicopters launching missiles into her house, safe from a distance of a good 20 yards away. The general tone of blowing-shit-up-with-little-actual-collateral excess is explained in a throwaway line that states that subtlety died the day the “big dude with the hammer fell out of the sky”, which almost feels like a piece of meta-commentary by Black about being stuck writing a story that must function within the multi-platform Marvel universe.

There's constant - if deliberately oblique - references to The Avengers herein, with RDJ's Tony Stark suffering post-traumatic stress disorder and anxiety attacks and insomnia after his role in “New York” with the “aliens.” He goes through the obligatory bottoming-out of the vanished super-hero; 'dying' in a Mandarin attack, yet really, merely, going offline (which, in the digital era, is akin to a kind of death), abandoned by even his gay robot sidekick, forced to trudge through the snow, make coin-op calls from a phone booth, look through an actual paper file, and fashion home-made equipment from a big-box-hardware-store-splurge like some student radical making molotov cocktails outta wine bottles and tampons. This is an attempt to humanise the condescending billionaire playboy, but it doesn't change his 1%er political stripes (also: mercenary biorobomachines are good when controlled by our hero, but Godless abominations when controlled by our villain); and turning him and Paltrow into bickering husband/wife writ along the most clichéd lines - He always working! She's always nagging! - is a perfunctory piece of identifying-with-character writing that wastes an opportunity to add meaning or depth to cardboard cut-outs.

It's a minor complaint, in the context, given few will come to Iron Man 3 for characterisation; will we be expecting anything but wisecracks and explosions. Black delivers on both the former and the latter; the film detonating multi-million-dollar mansions, Mann's Chinese Theater, Air Force One, and an entire oil refinery. In one scene, Polo Don and The President(!) verily rope-swing in front of a giant fireball with all the gay derring-do of matinée pirates; capturing the film's essential silliness and its preponderance of CGI explosions in one meaningless moment. The Batman may've grappled with the darkness that dwells within the hearts of man; Iron Man 3 just wants to blow shit up and crack wise about yr mama.