Honolulu Weekly

Iron Man is the best superhero movie since Batman Begins. This is saying a lot due to recent horrors like Ghost Rider and Spider-Man 3, which have caused not only fans of Marvel Comics, but filmgoers with good taste, to fear any cinematic adaptation coming from the venerable comic book company. What makes the film work, though, is not just one man fighting evil in a cool metal suit like something out of a Tom Clancy wet dream. The film has genuine, hilarious wit.

There is a small throwaway scene with billionaire weapons manufacturer Tony Stark (Robert Downey Jr.) returning after being held hostage by Afghanistan terrorists. Seeing the atrocities his weaponry wrought on innocents in the Middle East, he decides to use his MIT-genius to build a suit to defend the people he put in harm’s way. As he works in the warehouse sized tech-workshop of his palatial Pacific Coast mansion with his holographic screens, he is seen dumping unnecessary items into a 3-D representation of a trashcan–apparently Stark is so brilliant, he found a way to improve the Mac OS. It also takes a certain amount of brilliance on the filmmakers’ part to add just a small flash of wit to the proceedings and Iron Man is filled with moments like these.

What makes the movie so successful is entirely the work of Downey. Whether he’s drinking with his pole-dancing stewardesses on his private jet, wise-cracking at his automated fire extinguisher system, or letting Gwyneth Paltrow finger a large cavity in his chest, he not so much gives a performance but molds the role as a canny statement on the entire hedonistic journey of his career as an actor. It’s a smart move that causes you to feel his presence even while covered head to toe in impenetrable, face-obscuring armor. The acting job is so spot-on, energizing and flawlessly entertaining in comedy both verbal and physical, the man deserves an Oscar nomination.

Jeff Bridges is also darkly swarmy enough to make an impression amidst the titanium as Obadiah Stane, Stark’s ruthless second-in-command, who creates a suit of his own for purposes fiendish in nature. Paul Bettany (The Da Vinci Code, Master and Commander) gets a few sarcastic lines in an un-credited cameo as the voice of Stark’s computer, JARVIS.

Fairing not so well are Terrence Howard (Hustle & Flow, Crash) and Paltrow. As Stark’s Air Force buddy Jim Rhodes, Howard seems to be impatiently biding his time until he is called upon in a sequel to don a suit of armor of his own, presumably to follow the War Machine storyline from the comic books. Paltrow does what she can to inject spunk into Pepper Potts’ admin assistant character but the role is unconvincingly jimmied to be a rushed romantic interest. Also hit and miss are the computer effects. Some sequences are thrilling, like when Iron Man saves Afghan refugees and tries to out-fly fighter jets, but others are just video game-ish–the scene where he duels a tank just looks fake. It’s too bad more time and care wasn’t spent on these scenes since it looks like old Shell-head could have persuasively waged the aftermath of Charlie Wilson’s war. Still, director Jon Favreau deserves a good heap of credit for delivering a project of wit while surrounded by so much cold CGI steel, especially considering that the only thing on his resume qualifying him for the gig was Zathura.

The best and most successful superhero franchises have actors who created a rounded inner life for their alter-egos. Tobey Maguire and Peter Parker. Christian Bale and Bruce Wayne. Hugh Jackman and Wolverine. Even Wesley Snipes as Blade. They made characters that were compelling even when they were out of costume, and they made you want to see them over and over each summer. Downey makes us want to see Tony Stark again.

And make sure you stay till the end of the credits. There’s one hell of a bonus scene with a cameo appearance that’s gonna make fanboys cheer. 

Where in the World … is (a lot) better than it sounds. If you saw Morgan Spurlock’s first documentary, Super Size Me, you know to expect large dollops of humor somehow transforming into casual seriousness, laced with unique insight. In Size, Spurlock wanted to see what would happen if he ate only McDonald’s food for several months … and found out: he developed the beginnings of seven of the most serious diseases known to “modern” man, and stopped after his bevy of doctors told him he was killing himself.

Now comes the Osama bin Laden doc, in which Spurlock received beaucoup inoculations and terrorist-proofing physical training before he went off to Afghanistan, Egypt, Jordan, Israel, Morocco, Saudi Arabia and, yes, Pakistan, asking people straight-up if they knew where bin Laden was … and the answers to this seemingly ingenuous question show us more about the Middle East than hours of network news ever has.

The movie begins almost flippantly, making fun of itself and its naive quest, and almost imperceptibly shadens and deepens. Spurlock’s friendly, open-faced demeanor worked wonders with “ordinary” interviewees–he wisely includes only a few politicians and officials–most of whom say “Pakistan,” and then often proceed to tell him much more, with their faces as well as words.

Among those questioned are college students, rug merchants, vendors, journalists, U.S. troops, Orthodox Jews (who try to attack him) and Palestinians, whose candor and evasions speak volumes. Most profess to hate the U.S. government but not the American people–all, that is, but one out-and-out al-Qaida sympathizer. In its goofy, entertaining way, the film shows us another side–a populist side–to the countries whose names Americans are beginning to learn and take “seriously.” It’s a humanizing film about “ordinary” people caught up in the whirlwind of recent history.

Spurlock even gives us a partial happy ending. His conceit is that since his partner is pregnant, he wants to find out more than he knows about bin Laden. When he returns just in time to witness the birth of his child, the film ends happily, with Spurlock knowing a little bit more than he did. And just maybe the film audience, in an odd oblique way, does too. 

The success of 300 has turned the beginning of March into a period for half-naked men to run free and pummel each other in the name of the almighty box office. This apparently new tradition of annual Fratboy Brawl Cinema gets its first entry with 10,000 BC. Unlike the aforementioned Spartan bash-fest though, this film lacks a certain level of self-awareness, as well as well-spaced doses of kicky, violent fun that makes the experience as boring as walking the entire span of Mesopotamia blind-folded and bare-foot without an iPod.

Young apprentice hunter D’Leh and his dread-locked tribe live a peaceful, woolly mammoth-stalking life in their village. Lately, the hairy elephants have been migrating past their estates less and less though, and their people are beginning to worry about starvation. According to the prophecy intoned by a bug-eyed elderly woman named Old Mother, a warrior will rise, get busy with a child with blue eyes adopted from another tribe, and defeat the ‘four-legged demons’ that come to disrupt their way of life and steal their people to put them into slavery.

Eventually these demons come: marauders on horseback, who rope the peaceniks up and march them over snow, jungle, and desert (pre-continental shift!) to enslave them into their god-like leader’s sphinx and pyramid-building scheme. Of course, D’Leh’s beloved girl with the blue eyes is one of the prisoners and our caveman hero embarks on a journey after his woman, picking up different tribes and amassing an army intent on letting his people go.

10,000 BC is bone-headedly dumb, but what should one expect really? It’s a fracking caveman movie for the Clan Bear’s sake and it should be more fun than you can shake a mammoth tusk at. Unfortunately, the film is a seventh wonder of boredom. Although it’s less than two hours, it feels far longer. The characters track their quarry for miles and the action sequences to break up the walking and army recruitment scenes are few and far between.

What does work though are the computer-generated recreations of woolly mammoths grazing in the plains and later, in the movie’s sole instance of real excitement, stampeding down the pyramid walk-ways. What looks just plain crappy and fake is the fearsome saber-tooth tiger. The juxtaposition between the CGI image of the big cat and the actors performing with him is so sloppily done that it borders on Cool World territory. The most intriguing of the creatures are herds of killer ostriches that stalk D’Leh and company in the jungle areas like velociraptors with feathers and beaks.

Buddha bless director Roland Emmerich (Independence Day, Godzilla, The Day After Tomorrow) and his seemingly stubborn mission to unleash CGI-enhanced B-movies onto modern civilization. Had this man been working in the ’50s, we would enjoy his work on MST3K. At this point in his career though, he just needs to stop taking his material so seriously and just step on the gas pedal of his Sci-Fi-Trashmobile. The film could’ve used more species of ferocious animals and less emo hang-ups from the humans. Instead of great battles and prehistoric rumbles, we get the main characters moaning and groaning about daddy abandonment issues and the lack of self-confidence to be a leader. You practically want to throw a copy of A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life’s Purpose at the screen so that we can get on with some killer ostrich action.

During a scene where D’Leh frees a saber-tooth tiger from a trap, he tells the beast, ‘Do not eat me when I set you free.’ You can see the actor struggling to force down the urge to insert Indiana Jones-like pragmatism into the dialogue–a personality trait humans won’t develop for a few more generations. The audience in the theater roared with laughter. 10,000 BC would have been much more fun had Emmerich caught on the joke as well.