Iron Man 3

Pri­or to dis­cussing the par­tic­u­lars of this movie, let’s attempt to pin down the con­tin­u­ing allure of the Iron Man char­ac­ter. There’s a cer­tain sub-set of super­hero movie which requires us to sym­pa­thise with afflu­ent, mid­dle-aged, immac­u­late­ly dressed and coifed men who have more mon­ey than they know what to do with. These men spend much of their down-time ensconced in a taste­ful­ly décor’d man­cave strug­gling to con­coct inno­v­a­tive ways to dis­pense of their wealth so they might pro­tect the frail, impo­tent masses.

Bruce Wayne is afford­ed his Dark Knight sta­tus by sheer dint of his whop­ping finan­cial inher­i­tance. The X‑Men are per­son­al­ly plucked from obscu­ri­ty so their poten­tial can be har­nessed by a pri­vate peace-keep­ing enter­prise. Thor comes from roy­al stock, in a man­ner of speak­ing. Their blight derives from an abun­dance of means. It’s not what they can do. It’s what they have time to do.

Iron Man’s louche, geometrically-goatee’d Tony Stark embod­ies per­haps the most trou­bling incar­na­tion of the super rich-busi­ness­man-as-self-styled-cru­sad­er. The satir­i­cal depths of his char­ac­ter pen­e­trate through the realms of gener­ic com­ic book fan­ta­sy. First appear­ing in the ear­ly 1960s, he could be seen as a lat­ter-day incar­na­tion of Don Drap­er, with the lib­er­tine ten­den­cies of his pub­lic per­sona giv­ing way to deep-set exis­ten­tial malaise. He also encap­su­lates the cul­ture of cor­po­rate excess of the ​’80s and ​’90s, a Reaganomics poster child whose wealth fuels his own sense of macho dare­dev­il grandstanding.

Yet his super sta­tus was born – or rather its neces­si­ty became man­i­fest – on the back of greed. Pri­or to any spu­ri­ous anti-mil­i­tarist epipha­nies fea­tured in the first two Iron Man movies, Stark Indus­tries was a heart­less muni­tions man­u­fac­ture, and the Iron Man cos­tume was pro­duced fore­most as a weapon rather than a deter­rent. A por­tion of Stark’s con­tin­u­ing project appears to be to right the wrongs of his fis­cal­ly las­civ­i­ous past, to pro­duce com­plex mil­i­tary hard­ware in a bid to apol­o­gise for his ear­li­er follies.

In Iron Man 3, direct­ed and co-writ­ten by Shane Black, Stark Indus­tries no longer does weapons stuff. Robert Downey Jr’s play­boy CEO/​pathfinding mechan­ic has even ced­ed the reigns of the com­pa­ny over to his oth­er half, Pep­per Potts (Gwyneth Paltrow).

Yet instead of fun­nelling his vast knowl­edge of engi­neer­ing into some­thing that might help the human race, he uses it for per­son­al gains: to make him­self omnipo­tent. Per Black’s own admis­sion, this fran­chise sequel offers a loose retelling of Dicken’s ​‘Christ­mas Car­ol’ as Stark is giv­en a sharp, tri-tiered remind­ed of his emo­tion­al pri­or­i­ties by the onslaught of a molten, mega­lo­ma­ni­a­cal think tank stooge in the shape Guy Pearce. But for­giv­ing the sins of the super rich is no easy task and Tony Stark is no Ebenez­er Scrooge. Plus, we’re at the point now where it’s not that Downey is play­ing Stark, Downey is Stark. Or maybe Stark is Downey?

This new Iron Man movie is prob­a­bly the strongest of the series. The empha­sis is on flip fun all the way. The script by Black and Drew Pearce is pre­ci­sion engi­neered towards snark­i­ly sub­vert­ing cliché rather than forg­ing a gen­uine­ly rip­ping, coher­ent and engag­ing sto­ry with any great depth and moral ambi­gu­i­ty. But it does what it does very well, par­tic­u­lar­ly in the scenes Downey shares with a dirt poor Spiel­ber­gian scamp at whom he spits with­er­ing (and hilar­i­ous) insults.

Black is inter­est­ed in explor­ing the prob­lems inher­ent in Stark’s impris­on­ment with­in the 1%, but he’s also as intrigued by how a mod­ern super vil­lain is able to paint his own image and dis­sem­i­nate his mes­sage of destruc­tion. Ben Kingsley’s mous­tache-twirling evil­do­er, The Man­darin, is intro­duced via chop­pi­ly edit­ed, Chris Mor­ris-style TV takeover mon­tages. His image and his free­dom-hat­ing rhetoric tap into post‑9/​11 fears of ter­ror­ist attacks on Amer­i­can soil. The pres­i­dent is in his sight lines.

Aside from offer­ing a clas­sic redemp­tion arc, Iron Man 3 is a film about pub­lic rela­tions. There is the sug­ges­tion that the only way to be suc­cess­ful (par­tic­u­lar­ly in the world of high-tech aer­i­al com­bat on aban­doned oil plat­forms), is to strip your image and your project back to its very core. The Man­darin offers a wry satire of image manip­u­la­tion which com­ments on the busi­ness of being evil in the mod­ern, media-savvy world.

Near the begin­ning of his film, Stark leaves his suit in the park­ing bay of a surf ​‘n’ turf shit­box like some bust­ed old dirt bike. He finds his pur­pose once more when he’s forced to con­struct a super­hero suit from the prod­ucts pur­chased at a hard­ware store. Iron Man 3 sets out a sim­ple stall: The good guy is stripped of his pro­tec­tion, of his wife and of his will to work as a super­hero. The bad guy is cloud­ed in lay­ers of media man­aged obfus­ca­tion and tech­no fuzz. Shane Black finds a way to give us a rich guy we can root for.