VEN-GEANCE FROM THE GRAVE…
…KILLS THE PEE-PULL HE ONCE SAVED.
Iron Man was great! Pretty much every human being with a blog has already told you exactly why it was great, though, so I won’t belabor the whole thing TOO much. I’ll just say the designs were beautiful, Robert Downey Jr. is America’s greatest living genius (take THAT, Nobel-Prize-winning quantum physicist Murray Gell-Mann! ), the action/humor balance was just right, and The Dude had a beard to end all beards. And that final moment before the credits was just brilliant, too… I’ve always wanted to see a scene like that.
BUT. I was talking to a friend of mine earlier, and he had a serious problem with the movie. He just couldn’t get past the weakness of the villain. And, you know, it’s true, the villain isn’t quite as compelling as everything else in the movie. It didn’t bother me as much as it bothered him, but I could see where he was coming from. The actor (Is it a spoiler to say who it is? It’s kind of obvious…) does a great job with what he was given, but honestly, he wasn’t given a whole lot. And maybe that was unavoidable; In this new batch of superhero movies, there’s so much time spent setting up just who these heroes are, their origins, their powers, their inner conflicts, relation to the supporting cast, etc., that the bad guys and their plots often get sidelined a bit. Spider-Man Number One and Batman Begins both had that problem, I think. Maybe the issue is just that great villains and “origin stories” have trouble fitting in the same movie… You have to get past all that before you’ll have time to develop a really strong, memorable movie bastard.
Then again, as my friend pointed out, tell that to Clarence Boddicker.
Anyway, the discussion did bring up the question, “Who are your favorite movie villains of the past few years (say, 10)?” So here’s the list of bad guys I’ve seriously enjoyed hating over the past decade (not really in any order, except maybe the first two):
1. Anton Chigurgh (No Country for Old Men)
2. Captain Vidal (Pan’s Labyrinth)
3. Stuntman Mike (Death Proof)
4. O-Ren Ishii… and Elle Driver and Budd and GoGo (the Kill Billses)
5. Agent Smith (The Matrix)
6. Tyler Durden (Fight Club)
7. Mrs. Carmody (The Mist)
8. Kroenen (Hellboy)
9. Dr. Octopus (Spider-Man 2)
10. Sadako (Ringu)
I guess I felt sorry for Dr. Octopus more than I hated him, really, but still, a solid character. And, yeah, Kroenen is more of a cool visual than a cool character (“A slight case of the bobafetts,” as his physician would say). But he’s got an interesting backstory, so he stays. Davy Jones is pretty much in the same boat as Kroenen in that sense, but it’s important to cut lists like this off at 10, lest we risk angering the Great Gods of Arbitrarium.
Who’s on your list? (Just the past 10 years, I mean. Apologies to Mr. Boddicker.)
…Honestly, didn’t like Iron Man all that much. I mean, yes, I liked most everything you mentioned, but the plot also really bugs me from an ethics standpoint.(surprise surprise, Relenz is a self-righteous asshole channeling Lieberman)
We’re usually supposed to live vicariously through the protagonist during Marvel movies. What does it say about us when the person we’re identifying with is Tony Stark, a wonderfully well portrayed asshole of the highest(lowest?) caliber?
The whole “float around pointing your palm at things and making them go boom” stuff feels a bit god-complexy to me. Iron Man isn’t attacked by anything that poses any danger to him until the final scenes.
The villain with a higher level of common sense, that I would rather have lunch with than Mr. Stark, is killed by the local plot device. I’m sort of tired of these.
I’m also a bit confused by one thing. Tony talked about converting his company to stop making weapons, then went and built the suit before doing anything else. Kinda infuriatingly egotistical, shallow and shortsighted. I guess that’s in character, though.
One thing I will say I loved was all the little references to the members of W’s staff. Also, thanks to the Speed Racer trailer, I am now blind.
Tyler Durden is a protagonist, silleh. 8]
Assholes make wonderful heroes, because the truly ‘good’ ones just come off as holier-than-thou. Stark and his kind are douchebags, and that’s why people can identify with them. I’d much rather have lunch with Deadpool than Capt. America.
And as for villains? Love ’em. Inherently. I have no idea why. But the ones that are truly scary, the ones that work perfectly as bad guys? Not the ones doing what they’re doing out of greed or selfishness, but the ones that really, deep down, think that they’re doing the right thing. Which is one of the reasons I DO love Stark. He was one of the few good things to come of Civil War.