brobi-wanwrites

[brobi-wanwrites]

Out-Dated Review: Iron Man

A decade ago life was a bit more simple. I was turning 15 and besides finding time to play GTA IV and high school I didn't have a care in the world. My birthday was never a big deal but earlier that year I got my first PS3 and was desperate to start a Blu Ray collection. I told my mother the one thing I wanted for a gift that year was Iron Man. She delivered. That night after reading the case over a dozen times me and my best friend would sit down and watch the movie that jump started the Marvel Cinematic Universe. 

At the time I knew as little as you could about Ironman. I spent most of my time reading Spider-Man, X-men and Batman comics so the only things I really knew about Tony Stark was that he was a rich alcoholic and was really prevalent in 2006s Civil War which was in my backlog of comics. Going into this movie I really had nothing to go on besides the great reviews it was getting and that I was always excited to see a comic book character get their chance on the big screen. After credits rolled like many people my expectations were blown away. I watched it again and again enjoying every minute of it. I then dove into my comic backlog and read Civil War and any other Ironman story I could find. It’s safe to say that the first Ironman reinvigorated my and many others love for comics, all while starting a universe that would have as deep of lore as the comics they adapted from. 

So ten years later, does Ironman hold up?

(SPOILERS)

Lets start things off with the story. 

We’re introduced to Playboy Billionaire Weapons Designer/Manufacturer Tony Stark and he’s just as much as cocky jerk as you would think he’d be. Skipping out on an award presented to him so he could gamble, sleeping with a reporter who’s writing a hit piece on his company and giving little care to the crew of his private plane as he arrives late for its departure. Couple this with how he almost gloats at the amount of death and destruction his weapons bring you would be safe to assume that Tony is unremarkable cliche villain, except he’s not. 

I don’t know if it’s his charm alone, his acting chops or how relatable he is to the character but Robert Downy Jr. makes Tony Stark probably one of the most believable and entertaining personality in the MCU. He brings so much life and fun to Tony even before his good guy turn in this movie. Easily stealing every scene he’s in, RDJ was undoubtedly destined to play Tony Stark.

Speaking of good guy turns.

Things go astray for Tony after a weapon presentation in Afghanistan as he’s fatally injured and kidnapped by a terrorist group known as The Ten Rings (more on them later). He awakes in a cave with a car battery attached to his chest, powering an electromagnet that’s keeping the shrapnel away from his heart and other vital organs. Parties amirite? He’s made aware that The Ten Rings are his “loyal customers” and have been using all his weaponry and is then forced to build them his latest weapon. Tony reluctantly agrees and uses the supplies and resources to build something a bit more powerful, a miniaturized Arch Reactor. An invention of his fathers that’s used to power a factory, Tony designed his to be a little more compact. It has enough power to keep the magnet [in his chest] charged for a thousand lifetimes or something big for ten minutes. 

Thus Ironman is born.

Even for ten years old at this point, the CGI still holds up. The suits in this movie, whether it’s the Mk I, II or III all look fantastic and just completely seamless. I never once even questioned if they built an actual prop suit or not, it looked so good i assumed they did. Coincidentally the first Ironman is the only movie they actually built the full suit, every subsequent movie they used mo-cap primarily. 

After 3 months using only weapon parts and presumably some scrap metal Tony builds the Mk I and kicks some serious ass in his escape. He’s quickly reunited with his friends and coworkers back in the States and damn does he want a burger. Also he announces very publicly he’s done with making and selling weapons. This is Tony’s big turn, he realizes the real cost of him profitting off war with his weapons and decides he is alone responsible for making things right. His business partner and his deceased fathers long time friend Obadiah Stane advises him to lay low for awhile after crashing his companies stock with his big announcement.

The Stark Employee Roster.

RDJ may steal the whole show but Ironman boasts a pretty big and talented cast. Gwenneth Paltrow as the remarkable and composed assistant to Stark Pepper Potts, she’s a joy to have on screen and perfectly bounces dialogue off RDJ. Terrence Howard plays Stark's best friend and military liaison Colonel James “Rhodey” Rhodes, Howard plays this character really cool and I have a hard time seeing Rhodey as much as I see Terrence Howard. His chemistry with RDJ is phenomenal off the bat though, something that takes Cheadle & RDJ about another movie or so to get right. Paul Bettany lends his soothing voice to articulate Siri knock-off known as JARVIS. While his role obviously becomes more expanded upon in later films, Bettany brings a simple yet appealing approached to the A.I. here that pairs well with Tony’s persona. Rounding it out you have the rugged Jeff Bridges playing Tony’s mentor and eventual madman Obadiah Stane. Bridges brings something to this role that I can’t quite put my finger on, he just fully leans into this character and I can feel his presence on screen. He does however have a very sudden change of character entering the third act, he goes from conniving business man to super villain so abruptly I may have whiplash (wink) now. 

Bored and nothing to do.

Stark finds himself in isolation and does the only thing his obsessive brain lets him do, work. He begins designing and testing an updated version of the suit he escaped imprisonment with. The Mk II is a thinner, shinier and more airborne suit than its predecessor. It just isn't up to snuff for Tony though, so after a quick flight test with some icing issues, he completely redesigns the suit. After seeing on TV that someone is throwing a party without him, Tony decides laying low just isn’t for him and crashes the party. Thankfully the party is hosted by Stark Industries so Tony can just walk in with no real problem. It’s here that Tony learns that his mentor and friend Obadiah Stane filed an injunction against him and is trying to force him out of the company and may be dealing weapons under the table. 

Tony decides take the moral high ground and hops in his new suit the MkIII which must be the coolest getting dressed montage I’ve ever seen, then flies for 6 hours back to Afghanistan. He proceeds to just ruin the Ten Rings day by destroying their weapon caches, which include plenty of Tony's own weapons. After surely making the locals think he’s some sort of alien or metal angel he flies back home, only to be intercepted by two fighter jets. What ensues is an entertaining little game of cat and mouse for a minute until Rhodey, whose job is seemingly just to be convenient to Tony shows up and Tony informs him he is in the suit that the fighters are chasing. Rhodes clears everything up as a trainig exorcise and Tony makes it home.

It’s here our big reveal happens, Obadiah is a bad guy and he hired the Ten Rings to kill Tony but they didn’t like the deal, so they altered it like Vader. Now they want to alter it even further and have Obadiah build them Metal Soldiers like the one Tony escaped with.  Obidiah smiles and politely kills this faction of the Ten Rings and figures he might as well build his own suit with his own arch reactor.

Back at the factory while speaking to his team of scientists about their inability to replicate Tony’s miniaturized Arch Reactor, Jeff Bridges delivers the best line in the movie. 

“TONY STARK WAS ABLE TO BUILD THIS IN A CAAAVE, WITH A BOX OF SCRAPS”

After this everything starts to happen real fast. Pepper finds a video that directly incriminates Obadiah, he panics and politely tries to kill tony, Rhodes shows up to try and save a dying Tony but he already saved him self. Once he catches his breath Tony hops in his suit to go find Obadiah. Terrence Howard takes a look at the MkII and decides it’s better that Don Cheadle gets to use it. Pepper while accompanied by some agents finds Obadiah's lab only then to be ambushed by Obadiah in a what can only be described as the offspring on the hulk-buster armour and war machine, Iron Monger. 

Tony flies in with no time to spare and saves Pepper. A street fight ensues between Iron Man and Iron Monger with them chucking cars at one another. This fight seems oddly small scale now, having been spoiled by the massive fights we’ve seen in recent MCU movies. The smaller scale and one on one fight does feel more personal though and given that this is Iron Mans first outing it makes sense.

The fight goes airborne after Tony realizes he’s no match for the strength of the Iron Monger suit. Much to Tony’s surprise Obadiah has upgraded his suit as well and its now able sustain flight but as a call back to earlier in the film, the Iron Monger suit has an icing problem in higher atmosphere. Tony's suit begins to lose power as they fall back to the roof of the Stark factory. Tony sabotages Obadiah's suit so he cant shoot straight and Obadiah squishes Tony's helmet. Rude. The two men begin to fight with there wits and the bare minimum of their suits. Tony tells pepper to overload the Arch Reactor beneath him and Obadiah and after Tony begs she pushes the bug red button. Boom. Obadiah's suit short circuits and he falls to his death into the Arch Reactor causing it to explode.

I am Iron Man

I gotta give credit to this movies ending. Setting itself up like Tony is going to become your average secret identity super hero but in perfect Tony Stark fashion it subverts that by Tony declaring to the world he is Iron Man. It’s easily one the most memorable moments in all of the MCU. We also get our first name drop of SHIELD here, which at the time blew my mind because up until then super hero movies were so self contained. Credits roll and a Marvel tradition is born as the credits finish and we’re given another scene as Tony walks into his house to see a someone standing in his living room. NICK MF FURY.

“Think you’re the only super hero in the world? Mr.Stark you’ve become part of a bigger universe, you just don’t know it yet.” 

One of the single most important lines in all of the MCU. When I saw this my 15 year old brain melted and while at the time I was ignorant to who owned what in regards to film rights my mouth foamed over the idea of all marvel characters existing together in a shared movie universe. It only took ten years and a couple billion dollars but all the marvel are finally gonna share a universe together.

Does it work?   

With full retrospective Iron Man is your cut and paste Phase 1 MCU origin movie where the bad guy is basically just a different color pallet than the good guy, which is totally fine. There’s a reason they use that formula, it establishes characters perspective and personality along with their skill set to the audience. It could be because it was the first or just the combination of Favreau and RDJ and all the other cogs in the machine but no movie uses that formula better than Iron Man. I’m in awe of how much fun I had with this movie, I highly recommend going back and watching it again if you haven't recently. It holds up as it’s own movie but with the added benefit that you can clearly see how the whole MCU evolved from the style of Iron Man.

VERDICT  

You should already own this, go make some pop corn and watch this./10

[brobi-wanwrites]

Justice League (2017) Review

Let’s have a thought experiment. I want you to imagine you’re seeing The Avengers for the first time ever, except someone has changed the contrast and saturation settings. Someone also took a few scenes near the middle and end of the film out and added scenes from Age of Ultron. On top of it all you’ve only seen Captain America The First Avenger and Civil War before watching Avengers and you have no context of the other films in the MCU. That is basically Justice League, or at least what it feels like to watch it.

PLOT & STORY

There isn’t one. 

Okay that’s untrue but what plot is here is thinner than wax paper and unlike the horrendous BvS, which plot at least sounds good on paper, Justice Leagues plot doesn't sound good in the mind of an inmate at Arkham who’s had too many run ins with the BvS Batman. It’s almost so simple it hurts, Steppenwolf - a big gray CGI villain - comes to earth and Batman must bring together all the characters he saw teaser trailers for in BvS. They have a small fight and feel defeated, after some doubts in themselves they rally and jump in for the finale fight with the hordes of faceless enemies, so on and so forth. It’s a plot line that has been done to death the past 10 years, twice already by this franchise. Fans and general movie goers alike are begging for something different. 

The other problem with Justice league is that it doesn't know what movie it wants to be. Its spends so much time trying to defend and simultaneously forgetting BvS while also setting up the future universe that it really never becomes its own movie. It becomes even more apparent when you remember that this was supposed to be a two part film and some plot elements just go no where or have no depth whats so ever. 

As for the characters that form Justice League they’re a lot more funny and entertaining to watch for the most part but not at the expense of break neck character development that is more based on fan response than an actual turning points for the characters. This can be transparently clear with Justice League’s portrayal of Batman who just one eighties his characterization because he feels bad for basically killing a guy whose mom has the same name as his mom. Jokes aside, there really isn’t any more to his character arch changing than that. In BvS he ready to kill a god like being because if there was a one percent chance that said god like being would go rogue that he had to take it as an absolute certainty, but in Justice league he wants all the god like beings together even though they run the same risk as the previous god like being.While this is more of a BvS problem than a Justice league problem, JL does nothing to rectify this except as I stated earlier to forget BvS.

Gal Gadot excels as Wonder Woman as she has before but without any real growth in this movie. While it’s not a bad thing, it;s just more of the same Wonder Woman. There was a hint that they may twist things up by making her the leader of the team but that was short lived. As for the rest of the team their establishment in the film is done fairly well if not rushed but not much is done in the way of humanizing them. Despite the personality of the Flash and Barry Allen blending together, I never felt we never got to know Barry better than we got to know the Flash and what we know about the Flash is that he’s new at this I guess. He seems inexperienced and says as much but yet we establish he’s stopped bank robberies in Suicide Squad and visually he has a super advanced suit despite said lack of experience. Cyborg was done better than I expected, he could’ve been an entirely robotic character with a lack of emotion but they did gave him more of a human arch, albeit it doesn’t amount to much besides “I’m sad I’m a robot”. Overall the characters are a little too jokey and their bond feels forced at times, the only relationship I believed was between Batman and Wonder Woman.

Slight spoiler alert but not really, Superman is at least a brighter colour this time around but suffers from the same break neck development that Batman does.

VISUAL & SOUND

If I’m being honest this movie is horrible to look at, the super characters all pop in saturation while the rest of the world is grim and dull. That may have been the stylized choice but the people on screen just don’t flow well with the background and it comes across as fake. The entire film looks like it was shot on a green screen, especially the finale act. 

Steppenwolf's design is so bland he may as well be a 9 feet tall grey blob. Why would they make an ugly big grey villain again though? Five movies in and they’ve done it four times now, how hard would have been to put a real persons face in there?

The fake lip that Cavil sports isn’t as distracting as people make it seem. I only noticed it when I was activing looking for it and one time near the end of the film when his lips are puckered.

The score is really nothing to write home about, save for a hint of the ‘89 Batman theme and ‘78 Superman theme trickled in here and there it’s an entirely forgettable score with little weight. It lacks the punch of the BvS score that always seemed too important for how that movie was executed but I feel it may have worked well here.

VERDICT

Justice League does a lot of things wrong, be it plot or character development, at its best its not that good. That said, its a lot more fun than BvS and Suicide Squad were but not as fun (nor as good) as Wonder Woman. Justice League isn’t worth the price of theatre admittance, it would be wiser to wait till home video and rent online. Even if you skipped this movie and went into the next one without seeing JL you could fill in the banks pretty easy.

IN CLOSING

At the top of this review I made a comparison to The Avengers and some people may say that it isn't fair that I do that, that they are very different movies and should be judged as such. Justice League however different though, is a direct result of the success of The Avengers and the greater MCU. It’s WB and DC trying to jump on that success train and while it’s getting closer its still missing the mark. That’s because in my opinion WBs always trying to make up for their mistakes, as a result JL is trying fix BvS and BvS was trying to fix Man of Steel all while each movie is also trying to make a step forward. You can’t walk forward properly if you keep looking behind you.

IN RETROSPECTIVE 

Several months ago I wrote this review just after exiting the theatre from Justice League, at the time I was befuddled and frustrated with what I had just watched. Now almost a year later looking back I’m still surprised this movie got made. I recently re-watched this film and after taking such a long break from it I thought I’d enjoy this movie more than I originally did. I didn't. Quite a few things did jump out at me upon my second viewing though; Henry Cavil actually gave me the vibe of Superman this time around, I guess third time is the charm. I still think it’s a sudden character change from what we’ve seen in other DCEU films but I’m now willing to over look that considering how Superman-ish he is. 

I still don’t think this movie is good by any means but Warner Brothers seem insistent on keeping this universe alive for awhile at least. I just hope Aquaman is decent.

[brobi-wanwrites]

Outdated Review: Home Sweet Hell

Until recent years, the ideal goal for life was to become part of a Nuclear Family. Husband and wife with little perfect private schooled son and daughter. Mom at home while dad was out “winning the bread” as it were. Manicured lawns and white picket fences, house parties and neighbourhood committees. Of course who can forget a little bit of infidelity and murder.

PLOT

‘Home Sweet Hell’ is the story of the modern nuclear family with a ‘Dexter-esque’ twist to it. The film follows Don Champaign(Patrick Wilson) and his wife Mona(Katherine Heigl) in their seemingly normal lives. Don runs a chain of his own furniture stores while Mona tends to the house and kids. Things become quite apparent early in the film that Mona isn’t the most stable human being; overly controlling and obsessive is putting it mildly. She’s planned out their entire lives in her big “Goal” book; from the flooring they’ll get in a few years down to what days her and Don will do the nasty - the 9th of every other month if you’re curious. 

Now things go a little array when Don hires on a new female employee Dusty(Jordana Brewster), to his main store. Obviously an affair starts between the two when problems come between Don and Mona, an affair that leads to a possible pregnancy. After a few blackmail attempts, Don decides to fess up to Mona. She of course being a little nutty, is completely calm to the situation and simply informs Don that to fix his mistake and acquire their “goals”, he must kill Dusty. A wild chain of events transpire which show the true nature of Mona, a cold blooded killer who gets a little too much excitement out of the whole ordeal.

I’d like to say the plot is a little cliche, but I honestly can’t think of anything else to compare it to off the top of my head. True it’s very reminiscent of Dexter - especially in one scene containing plastic wrap - but the similarities end there aside from the “every-man serial killer” vibe the movie gives. The pacing works well with the plot and there were no moments I found myself arguing in disbelief over what was happening on screen. As dark comedies go though it’s not gut busting funny, there were a few chuckles here and there but nothing noteworthy, obviously more dark than comedy.  

CHARACTERS 

As soon as the movie starts you can tell Katherine Heigl is the show stealer. We’ve often seen Katherine in roles well she is bosy and controlling, so it’s not a stretch to see her here playing the life controlling Mona but this time she brings much more to that character arc; intimidation. As the movie progresses she becomes utterly terrifying in her obsession to maintain her goals and it’s the subtle touches she gives that make the performance spot on. The quirky smiles as blood is splashed on her face or the wide eyed look she gives when she’s pissed, it brought chills to my spine.   

Patrick Wilson gives a convincing if goofy performance in his role as Don but I think thats to be expected for the character. A man who realizes his wife is cold blooded killer would be expected to be a little panicky. Far from his best performance but he still manages to be enjoyable. The same can easily be said for the rest of cast too and while none feel out of place in the film, they’re definitely not at their best. Jim Belushi in particular feels highly underused in the film, as he’s often great for the laughs his character barely gets any screen time aside from offering obvious advice to Don.

VERDICT

‘Home Sweet Hell’ is worth a few laughs but in the end you’ll stay for the intriguing plot and Heigl’s performance, I think. It paces itself well enough that you won’t become bored and aside from a somewhat low ball ending it’s worth an afternoon viewing, not worth the effort of making popcorn but worth a bowl of chips.

I give ‘Home Sweet Hell’ a -

Once a Lifetime Viewing 

or on the standardized stale

5.8/10