Swing Shift: SPIDER-MAN: HOMECOMING

The latest product from the Marvel Studios factory is Spider-Man: Homecoming, a co-production with Columbia Pictures, that company making less an admission of failure and more a signal of strong showbiz jealousies. The Sony subsidiary hasn’t been able to make a Spider-Man feature as good as Sam Raimi’s since letting him go, but surely the powers that be were only interested in loosening the reins on their rights to the character when they saw the consistent huge grosses and quality control over at the Marvel Cinematic Universe. They didn’t want to do right by the character so much as do right by their producers and stockholders. Still, the result is precisely what you’d hope and expect from bringing in the people who brought us the whole Avengers product line. It’s brightly lit and full of good-humored banter, features a great cast of familiar faces playing colorful characters, and stops every so often for a dazzlement of colorful CG. Though the formula’s getting tired, this new entry manages a high degree of charm and fast-paced entertainment (and even a few genuine surprises). In addition to the predictable polish and routine beats of a Marvel plot machine, this widget has a sweetness and an energy that makes it slightly better than average. It’s good fun.

Picking up during the events of last year’s Captain America: Civil War, where this new interpretation of Spidey was first introduced recruited by Iron Man to be a potential second-string Avenger, Homecoming finds Peter Parker (Tom Holland) initially excited to be one of the gang. (This movie’s biggest uphill climb is having to bounce its continuity out of what was easily the MCU’s worst movie, a dull grey 147-minute slog.)  Alas, his dreams will not be coming true any time soon. Tony Stark (Robert Downey Jr.) gifts him a souped-up supersuit and tells him to stick to being a friendly neighborhood Spider-Man. The boy’s just fifteen, after all. There’ll be plenty of time to be a real hero when he’s older. This leaves the kid antsy and eager to prove himself, and allows the movie to stretch out with what’s always best about Spidey’s appeal: his average, every day, everyman problems. He has homework, an extracurricular academic challenge team, a cheerfully nerdy best friend (Jacob Batalon), an unrequited crush (Laura Harrier), a bully (Tony Revolori), a sweet prickly teammate (Zendaya), and a kind aunt (Marisa Tomei). He has a lot on his plate, plus the whole sneaking out every evening to patrol the streets, swinging from buildings to stop bike thieves and ATM bandits. 

Writer-director Jon Watts (of the small, tense, kids-in-over-their-heads thriller Cop Car) and his five co-writers understand the inherent charm of Spider-Man. They make him a relatable stressed-out teenager, just trying to fit in and do well at school while testing his powers. (They’re great, after all, and so, too, are his responsibilities.) With a bounce in its step, the movie makes like its hero and juggles the demands placed upon it quite skillfully. It weaves itself into the fabric of the MCU with better deftness than some of its inferiors, rooting its villain (The Vulture, played by Batman and Birdman himself, Michael Keaton) motivation in the aftermath of The Avengers. One of the more memorable villains in this mega-franchise, his backstory has him with a contract to clean up the damage from the alien battle, a lucrative deal that gets pulled when SHIELD classifies the high-tech debris. Now he’s flying in a makeshift jet-propelled wingspan, making his money on the black market, smuggling gadgets stolen from the various film’s climactic calamities (Winter Soldier’s D.C. craters, Ultron’s rattled fictional city, and so on). He and Peter – little guys hoping to make big marks – both have struggles proving themselves in this new outsized ecosphere of heroes and villains, which gives their clash a little charge. Keaton’s world-weariness plays nicely against Holland’s adorably boyish happy-to-be-here excitement, making for a compelling conflict.

Because the bad guy’s a local low-level troublemaker, he first shows up on Peter’s radar. Since the boy has trouble convincing Stark’s assistant (Jon Favreau) to take his calls, he feels obligated to put a stop to the mystery man’s bad deeds as he continually crosses paths with the evil plot. All this and the big dance, too. There’s the usual roster of fun character actors popping up to give the zippy plot some added wit and texture (Donald Glover, Bokeem Woodbine, Hannibal Buress, Angourie Rice, Martin Starr, and Michael Mando among the pleasant surprises popping up in tiny roles). They keep things pleasant and crackling with an agreeable comic charge between big splashy two-page spreads of action – leaping between buildings and off monuments, tussling with henchmen and saving civilians – that make for the usual superhero shenanigans. These are all suitably loud and explosive, but also swing with Spidey’s nimble acrobatics. Watts has managed to make a movie sparkling with enough fun and invention that its small piece pumps some life back to the larger franchise puzzle. It simply feels good to spend two hours with a character whose biggest conflict is wanting to contribute more positive impact in the world than he can manage. It’s easy to root for him.

Man Cub's Burden: THE JUNGLE BOOK

Disney’s latest attempt to transmogrify one of their animated classics into a live-action spectacle is The Jungle Book. This production takes their 1967 Rudyard Kipling adaptation, a simple, rambling, musical story, down to its bare necessities, building it back up into a pleasant jungle adventure. In the process it loses most of the cartoony energy and all but hints of two songs. But some of what it loses in vibrant animated silliness it gains in the weight and heft of the best imitation wilderness money can buy. It’s CGI made with an eye for live-action, computer animated with a real boy running through. The amiable feature tracks along leafy green oasis and rocky cliff, swampy waterhole and cavernous ruin, getting undemanding picture book tableau out of every development. It’s high-stakes and kid-friendly, a child’s eye view of the jungle as a place where, if you believe in yourself, you’ll survive just fine with the help of your animal friends.

In this jungle-as-playground we meet Mowgli, the kid who was found abandoned as a baby and raised by a pack of wolves. He’s played by newcomer Neel Sethi, an agreeable boy who seems to enjoy scampering about the scenery and speaking to the animals who growl and howl around him. (He also doesn’t mind wearing only red shorts, the traditional garb of the Jungle Boy, from Bomba on down. Nice of the animal parents to understand the need for pants.) He’s enjoying life as a wolf, playing with pups and looking up to his canine parents (Lupita Nyong’o and Giancarlo Esposito). Alas, the menacing tiger Shere Khan (Idris Elba) knows the danger man poses and demands Mowgli be killed for the good of all jungle kind. This leads wise panther Bagheera (Ben Kingsley) to decide the best option is taking the man cub to be safely reunited with his own kind. There’s not much to it, the characters filled in by typecasting and cultural memories, but the movie has a sturdy construction on which to build its digital sights.

What follows is a trip through beautifully fake scenery, with towering waterfalls and sun-dappled trees, swinging vines and staggering vistas. It’s as much like a jungle as a greenscreen stage in downtown L.A. can be these days. Top-notch effects work creates an often-convincing vision, fitting a movie that’s content to poke along through episodic little vignettes enjoying the company of a variety of animals. The creatures Mowgli encounters will be familiar to anyone who knows Disney’s original. Screenwriter Justin Marks makes sure to include the expected cast of characters, some voiceless (elephants, birds), others voiced capably by recognizable performers, like sneaky snake Kaa (Scarlett Johansson, slithery seduction), sweet lazy bear Baloo (Bill Murray, warm and loveable), and the envious orangutan King Louie (Christopher Walken, making eerie musical use of his usual unusual punctuation). Every majestic creature – a menagerie that would barely look out of place in a motion-capture Planet of the Apes – is animated with uncanny accuracy and remarkably authentic textures, real enough to pull off the illusion, but fake enough to not scare too many kids.

Director Jon Favreau is a good fit for this sort of film. Think of his work on Christmassy Elf, sci-fi board-game trip Zathura, and kicking off the Marvel Cinematic Universe with two Iron Mans. He knows his way around bright, clean, clear popcorn imagery, bringing a fine workmanlike competence to the spectacle that works because he believes in the movie magic of his effects and has the cast and crew to pull it off. There is some real majesty to its best moments, and at its worst a sense of predetermined comfort. We know where we’re going, but the way there is reasonably entertaining. There are primal fable-like qualities to the images of an innocent boy standing next to these dangerous beasts and finding his way to be their equal. It’s not a story of man conquering the flora and fauna, but becoming a part of them, an age-old scamper-through-the-wilderness-to-find-yourself tale.

Favreau realizes the Kipling tale’s cinematic heritage as a red-blooded boy’s adventure story, eager to admire the beauty of its setting and creatures so cheerfully faked for our amusement. It may take direct inspiration from Disney’s own classic in story, character, and music cues, but it’s as indebted to the Kordas’ Technicolor 1942 version, or Stephen Sommers’ 1994 pulpier-ish iteration. It’s always about giving a man cub a fantastical place in the natural spectacle of nature, to play with danger and emerge safe and sound. Favreau concludes his Mowgli’s story with appealing lessons about standing up for what you believe in, using your talents to protect others, and being proud of becoming your best self. Though it is interesting to note where the boy ends up. This isn’t a story about emerging from the wilderness to become a man, but engineering a way to remain boyish forever. Seems a fitting message for a company that hopes we’ll keep paying to see new versions of old childhood staples.

Good Eats: CHEF

Chef follows a man who once cooked for the love of it, but who, in his comfortable position as the head chef at a decent middlebrow restaurant, finds his passion dimmed by churning out the same old menu night after night. After a high-profile explosion of frustration that ends in him losing his job, he decides to strike out on his own and along the way rediscovers the passion that made him a chef in the first place. It’s tempting to read the movie as a metaphor for its own making. Writer, director, and star Jon Favreau got his start with relatively small productions (Swingers, Made) before getting bigger and bigger budgets (Elf, Zathura, Iron Man), eventually arriving at Cowboys & Aliens, a movie so blandly wedded to the worst storytelling impulses of modern Hollywood that I’ve already forgotten it ever existed. Now he turns up with the small, amiable Chef that says he would rather make something small and likable all on his own, instead of something big and predictable for someone else.

Both he and his character want to take their art wherever the muse leads them and have an audience show up to try the results because they trust the impulse behind it. Some scorn is reserved for customers who just want comfort food that provides what the consumer already expects. (What this metaphor says about someone like me who really likes his Iron Man 2, a movie he’s expressed disappointment with, is probably better left unexplored.) In any case, Chef follows a comfortable path as Favreau’s Chef Casper gets his professional groove back, reconciles with his ex-wife (Sofía Vegara), spends more time with his 10-year-old son (EmJay Anthony), and figures out what he really wants to be cooking.

It is not exactly a scrappy indie, but it’s probably as close to it as a baggy, pleasant, modestly budgeted production filled with recognizable actors can be. It’s the same kind of comfort food cinema Favreau has always been making, but the perspective is smaller and the heart more recognizably bleeding out on its sleeve. It is a shallow movie, and a long and shaggy one at that, but it has surface pleasures that keep it light, loose, and agreeable. Kramer Morgenthau’s bright cinematography finds the sun always shining. The montages of food prep look delicious. The non-stop brassy Cuban and New Orleans-influenced soundtrack is always rocking toe-tapping tunes. The film takes pleasure in its tasty dishes and booming music, and in the easy rapport amongst its characters.

As Chef Casper tries to figure out how to continue his career and find fulfillment in different aspects of his life, the movie ambles along, moving from a work/life balance comedy into a road movie in its second half. Along the way, we meet an ensemble cast of thin characters filled out by familiar faces. Dustin Hoffman plays his ex-boss. John Leguizamo, Bobby Cannavale, and Scarlett Johansson worked with him at the restaurant. Oliver Platt plays a famous food critic whose negative review is the inciting incident that gets the Chef fired. (More on that later.) Amy Sedaris has a funny scene as a determined publicist and Robert Downey, Jr. turns up in a very small role as an eccentric businessman who wants someone to take a busted old food truck off his hands. None of these characters are particularly well developed, but the performers are enjoyable presences, able to step into the film and be entertaining for a moment or two without pulling focus from the ensemble as a whole.

It’s too fuzzy and insubstantial to be called a character study, but it at least has a sense of self-awareness. That can all too easily slip away from a writer-director-producer-star driven production. Chef looks upon the creative personality of Chef Casper with an understanding that his ego, pride, passion, and self-doubt combine to create the drive that leads him to success and are the same traits that lead to his blow-up, then feed his drive to reinvent himself. A lazier movie would take the critic character and make him only a snarky villain, but it’s refreshing to see that he’s presented as a man doing his job just as much as the chef is. And when his bad review upsets the chef so much that he throws a fit in the middle of dinner service that ends with him storming out jobless, it’s because the writing picked at preexisting insecurities. The chef knows he could do better. Getting called out on it frustrates him, but that frustration quickly becomes determination.

The movie is confidently pleasant, cooking up an agreeable couple hours of entertainment. It’s no great thing, but it’s enjoyable. Its heart is in the right place, made with as much love as the tasty-looking sandwiches featured prominently in the movie’s final stretch. I bet theaters showing Chef would do well if they added them to the concession stand menu.

Heavy Metal: IRON MAN 3

Marvel has these Iron Man movies down to a formula that works for them. Going into one, we know we’ll meet Tony Stark, he’ll quip while introductions to this installment’s rouges’ gallery are made, and then things will get real serious for a time until everyone hops into metal suits, robots and weaponry activates, and the big showdown lasts until the pyrotechnics run out and the credits roll. After the overwhelming success of The Avengers, which put Stark in with a bunch of other Marvel heroes and let them rumble around for a while, there was some question if this old formula would still hold. To this I say, why not? Robert Downey Jr. is Iron Man, the sarcastic rich jerk jokester who can manage to hold that down long enough to save the day. He was instantly iconic when he first put on the armor back in 2008 and by now the role is inseparable from his inhabitation of it. He’s more than engaging enough to hold an entire movie, even one as perfunctory and mechanical as this one is.

The first Iron Man was an introduction, the second a total delight of a screwball actioner. In both cases, the charm came from the way director Jon Favreau pitched it all at the pace of a comedy, keeping the focus squarely on the performers and their interactions without letting the explosions weigh things down too heavily or distract from the personal stakes of it all. With Iron Man 3, Favreau handed the reigns to Shane Black, the screenwriter behind such muscular, sarcastic action efforts as Lethal Weapon and The Last Boy Scout and who made his directorial debut in 2005 with the Downey-starring meta-genre goof Kiss Kiss, Bang Bang. Black knows his way around a quip but, unlike Favreau, doesn’t keep things frothy. He brings the pain. The threat here isn’t as strictly personal, unlike the first two installments, which had baddies (Jeff Bridges, Mickey Rourke, Sam Rockwell) out for Tony Stark more or less individually. Here, a theatrical international terrorist known only as The Mandarin (Ben Kingsley) is broadcasting threatening messages and setting off explosions in public places. He’s not after Iron Man; he’s after us, or so it seems.

It’s Tony Stark who makes it personal, arrogantly giving the address of his Malibu beach house to news cameras, daring the villain to come to him. Bad move. He does. This sets off a chain of events that leaves Stark out of his suit fending for himself, giving Downey plenty of screen time before he's put back into his inexpressive digital cocoon. The plot soon involves two scientists from Stark’s past, one (Guy Pearce) who runs and one (Rebecca Hall) who works for a mysterious organization that’s clearly up to no good. There’s also a flammable, repairable thug (James Badge Dale) and a cute little boy (Ty Simpkins) who factor into the proceedings when convenient, as well as returning characters like Stark’s long-suffering girlfriend and business associate Pepper Potts (Gwyneth Paltrow) and the helpful, professional Colonel James Rhodes (Don Cheadle). All of these actors are clearly having a fun time, which helps to keep a movie with wall-to-wall special effects, danger and anxiety from becoming oppressively dour. Kingsley, especially, is having such a ball with his purposely over-the-top villainy that I found myself chuckling at his grave threats even as I vaguely registered the escalating stakes to which the film required me to respond.

Black’s script features a few nice twists, fun banter, a rapid pace, and some finely tuned comic lines of dialogue that sail in unexpectedly now and then and provide a welcome relief to the string of bloodless violence and collateral damage that makes up the villains’ plots. It’s all in good fun, evoking real-world menace and politics only to quash it under the metallic CGI boot of a billionaire engineer who is there to fix things as he can. It makes for an awkward fit, sliding between joking and deadly serious, cruel and almost sweet. The action set pieces are perfunctory at times, but end up mostly satisfying, like in a well-photographed air disaster and in one standoff that ends with a surprising bit of honesty on the part of a henchman. The finale may drone on for far too long and the explosions grow exhausting after a time, but that’s all part of the deal. There’s something to be said for a movie that sticks to its formula and serves up exactly what’s promised with some amount of skill. It’s rather inconsequential fun, the work of talented people simply giving us the usual skillful empty thrills.

Take it On the Run: IDENTITY THIEF

Melissa McCarthy is a talented performer, a funny, versatile woman who brings a full commitment to each and every part she plays. She deserves every bit of success that her breakout Oscar-nominated role in Bridesmaids is bringing her, but hopefully that success includes better roles than the one she has in Identity Thief. She co-stars in the title role as a woman who hijacks identities, wrings out all their financial potential, and then leaves her unknown-to-her victims to sort out the mess that’s left of their livelihoods. The movie wants to get big laughs out of her repulsive antagonistic sociopathic behaviors and then draw the audience in with sympathy for her simply through affection for the actress underneath. It’s not only a step too far for the film’s emotional journey, but it’s unfair to the character and the audience as well.

It’s a movie held together by one of those only-in-the-movies plots that exists only as an excuse to force two actors through an episodic series of run-ins with eccentric caricatures. Jason Bateman finds that his credit cards are maxed out, his credit rating just hit rock bottom, and he’s wanted for assault in Florida. As he’s in Colorado and definitely not the woman in the mug shot on file, he’s let go. The police tell him that unless the criminal who stole his identity showed up in their office, it could take a year or more to get his finances back in order. This is unacceptable to him, what with the pending promotion and a pregnant wife, so he heads off to find the thief and trick her into going back to Denver with him and confessing. It’s the kind of premise that invites far more questions than the script has any interest in answering.

Now, why his credit card company didn’t immediately flag the Florida charges as potentially fraudulent, I’m not sure. Why, as a reasonably intelligent character who works in finance, would we see him in the first scene giving his social security number over the phone to a person who called him claiming to be from a fraud detection agency? Who knows? It all exists simply to get the plot rolling, which in turn only exists to keep itself rolling. It falls apart not only if you think about it, but also even if you don’t. No matter. Bateman’s a fine straight man, especially when he gets the chance to show that deep down he’s just as crazy as all the other characters. He’s just better at hiding it. (See: Arrested Development. No seriously. See it if you haven’t. It’s great.) Here he doesn’t get that chance as he’s understandably upset that he ends up driving cross country with McCarthy as she’s chased by a bounty hunter (Robert Patrick) and a couple of gun-toting underlings (Genesis Rodriguez and T.I.) answering to a tough-as-nails drug dealer (Jonathan Banks, drifting off of his Breaking Bad menace).

The slack one-thing-after-another plot is filled with thoroughly unfunny car crashes and shootouts interspersed between cameos (Jon Favreau, John Cho, Eric Stonestreet, etc.) and long sequences of forced bonding between the charming-despite-the-writing leads. Director Seth Gordon, whose debut film The King of Kong has earned him perhaps too much good will from me, and whose tepidly dark comedy Horrible Bosses seems much better by comparison to Identity Thief, just can’t make this movie work. Craig Mazin’s screenplay is built around the kind of deeply psychologically damaged character that’s difficult to laugh at and hard to see a way to laugh with. By the end, it just gets sad. Of course, by then the filmmakers have expected us to be liking the thief for no other reason than because she’s pathetic, has a sad backstory, and because McCarthy’s so likable. It’s an emotional turn on which the entirety of the climax hinges and it just doesn’t work. Bateman tries his hardest to sell it, and it’s never going to be easy to dismiss the formidable McCarthy, but the material is just not there. It’s a lazy farce that could’ve used some tightening up, but even then would still be built on the unsteady foundation of miscalculated characterizations that fine actors could hardly save. As it is, they’re good enough to get close, but that’s not quite close enough.

Where the Buffalo and Aliens Roam: COWBOYS & ALIENS

I don’t like Cowboys & Aliens, which is especially disappointing since I more or less loved, or I was at least ready to like, the individual pieces. It starts as a dusty Western with a mysterious stranger (Daniel Craig) riding into a small frontier town. This is well before the aliens show up. Now, you wouldn’t normally expect a Western to feature a scene in which UFOs swoop down from the sky and shoot up a town with laser beams and rope up some townsfolk for study and probing, but this is no normal Western. As that great title would have you know, this is going to be a genre mash-up. The concept makes sense to me. Why are alien invasion movies always set in either the present or the future? Aliens could just as well pop in on the 1800’s. After all, H.G. Welles wrote his War of the Worlds in 1898. The setting’s a nice change of pace.

That mysterious stranger I was talking about wakes up in the middle of the prairie in the opening scene to find a strange metallic device attached to his wrist and a bloody gash in his side. He’s confused about all this, mostly because he has no memory of how he got there and who he is. When he wanders into the nearby small town he’s confronted by a crusty sheriff (Keith Carradine) who matches the stranger’s face with the one plastered on a wanted poster hanging in the little jail. The town, ruled over by a vicious cattle baron (Harrison Ford), wants to quickly send the man to Santa Fe to face trial. But before they get a chance to do that, the aliens swoop down.

After the close encounter results in several missing persons, the town rounds up a posse to chase down the “demons” responsible. Since the stranger’s metallic device seems to respond to the demons in bursts of compatible weapon fire, he’s freed and invited along. Along with the cattle baron and the stranger ride the town’s preacher (Clancy Brown), bar owner (Sam Rockwell), the sheriff’s grandson (Noah Ringer), and a woman who knows more than she at first reveals (Olivia Wilde). There’s also a very sweet dog that trots along beside them the whole way through.

It’s a fairly standard Western concept playing out here. The town is wronged in some way, then a small group rides out to make things right. But, of course, instead of Native Americans, robbers, or black-hat gunmen causing trouble for the townsfolk, it’s aliens. Their design is awfully derivative, all bug-eyed and slimy, but the effects are convincing and the action is more or less what you’d expect. The cowboys ride up guns blazing and the aliens fight back with their superior firepower. Because the aliens seem to be advanced enough to travel through space but dumb enough not to think too terribly hard about strategy, this all boils down to a matter of brains (the cowboys) versus high-tech brawn (the aliens).

Even as I write all that, knowing full well the failure of execution, I find that set-up tantalizing. It’s a real shame the film feels so lifeless when it should be filled with a zip and energy. The cast is, for the most part, remarkably grizzled, tough and likable and director Jon Favreau, who’s made great popcorn fun in the past with two Iron Mans, Elf, and the underseen Zathura, has some fun introducing his one unexpected element into what is otherwise a fairly standard Western and even creates some occasionally striking images of clean, classic style. What’s surprising is how dull and rote the material feels. This is cowboys and aliens, for crying out loud! This is the stuff of a boy’s playtime, the wild combining of complete disparate genre elements into one energetic what-if scenario.

Why, oh why, then must Cowboys & Aliens feel so unenergetic? I think it must come down to the script level. Credited to six writers, some of them quite good, it has the unimaginative feel of a great, weird, original concept that has had all of its kooky edges and wacky sides sanded down by committee. What’s left is the kind of movie in which I could occasionally predict the lines right before they came out of characters’ mouths. Such rote, paint-by-numbers genre play is what confines the great film living within this one to dying a slow, painful death. The cast, the director, and the technicians try valiantly to pump excitement onto the screen but the script lets them all down.

Kiss Kiss Clang Clang: IRON MAN 2

Iron Man 2 sent me into adrenaline-fueled euphoria. It’s a thundering, overstuffed sequel that never feels bloated or cumbersome because it’s pitched and paced at the level of graceful comedy and built around excellent actors giving carefully modulated character-based performances. It’s entertaining – a blast, actually. Only afterwards was I bothered by the flaws in the film. The first film had a lovely, elegant structure on which to hang its charming performances and enjoyable action. Though part 2 is ultimately suffering from a sagging midsection and enough strands of plot to obscure forward momentum, the two main action set-pieces are actually bigger and better, the comedy is zippier, and the ballooning supporting cast is exceedingly talented. Not only is Robert Downey Jr. continuing his truly great performance as Tony Stark, the billionaire who is also Iron Man,  not only does Gwyneth Paltrow continue to excel as Pepper Potts, his assistant, but this time they are joined by Mickey Rourke, Sam Rockwell, Scarlett Johansson, and Samuel L. Jackson who bring differing and intriguing qualities to their roles. Rourke gets a little underused, nearly buried by such a busy film, but his character is distinctive, menacing, and serves as a catalyst for Stark to learn more about his past.

In this sequel, Tony Stark is confronted with enemies approaching from several different angles at once. Rourke’s character is a classic problem of the past that intrudes on the present, the son of a man who had his life demolished by Stark’s father (who is charmingly played in sort-of flashbacks by Mad Men’s John Slattery). Rockwell plays a rival arms dealer who is trying to make the Iron Man look like the Tin Man. Smarmy and more than a little ridiculous, Rockwell very nearly steals the movie from Downey, no small feat. He lights up the screen, adding extra interest and joy with his mere presence. The same goes for Rourke; although he’s not used as much as he should have been, he draws attention to himself with his mere physicality, so aptly described by Slate’s Stephen Metcalf as resembling a “Julie Taymor puppet.” No one can match Rourke for pure intimidating glower.

The film is a high-gloss, whiz-bang summer action blow-out, filled with literal fireworks. It treads no new ground in big blockbuster filmmaking but treads the old ground about as well as it can be trod.  Returning director Jon Favreau keeps charm and dazzle blasting out of the screen as he keeps the pace and plotting nimbler than is usually seen in films of this type. It filled me with a kind of giddiness and excitement that carried me over the flaws. The film disappoints only slightly in its soft-pedaling and vague handling of politics, despite blatantly bringing it into the plot. The first film got a kick out of its left-leaning fantasy of an arm of the military-industrial complex, represented by Stark Industries, growing a conscience and using its powers for peace. Here, the politics are muddier. The sleazy senator played (excellently, I might add) by Garry Shandling is never tied to any particular ideology and the way the United States government reacts to the Iron Man situation is ill-defined. I understand the need to be politically restrained to play to a broad audience, but it’s a little awkward to bring up the topic through a Senate hearing in fake C-span footage and then fail to follow through with any true political resonance.

But, I hardly care. The pacing and politics aside, I found the movie to be an utter delight. Even the recasting, with Don Cheadle taking the place of the first film’s Terrence Howard role, barely registered. The film moves mechanically forward, eventually encasing nearly all of the best actors in these clanking metal suits, but I found the action to move along agreeably swiftly – for once the explosions almost seem to take up too little time. With zip and some (small) wit, the movie slapped a simple smile on my face.