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The screenplay hops from one similar highlight to another engaging your brains just about enough so you can appreciate the basic razzmatazz. God knows Hollywood has mastered the tech-heavy art of creating this super-hero universe for children and adults alike, which largely explains the world’s largest film industry expanding its audiences the world over, chiefly among the Chinese now. Indians are not an exception. No other film industry is capital intensive enough to recreate and almost approximate massively scaled fantasies that were originally designed as broad sketches in a kid’s comic book.
No one steps into a computer-generated film like this expecting great acting. Some decent dialogues will do. Robert Downey Jr,, whose face with age I think is morphing into Al Pacino’s, lends credibility to the lead part. The movie under-promises on the performances front, he rightly over-delivers. This also explains the success of the Iron Man franchise. This is the third instalment in the super-hero series. Ben Kingsley who has embodied Gandhi, the apostle of non-violence, is the world’s worst terrorist here. Or maybe he’s not. The movie’s conspiracy theory suggests that the face of terror has to be a convenient mask, obviously, think about it... Doesn’t such a person so exposed to his enemies become too easy a target to stall the grand plans otherwise? Maybe, Guy Pearce plays the super-villain Killian.
If you include the Cold War, which this comic series created by Stan Lee initially intended to reflect, humans have fought three World Wars so far, named so because their main objective was world domination. The ongoing war against terror may be the fourth. Killian says he wants to control this particular war by managing both the supply and the demand, of weapons, I suppose? It’s a fuzzy sort of purpose for an arch enemy. But that is only because I am sitting and thinking in the theatre while I should be gasping at the antics on the screen as heavy metals zip before my eyes aiming to attach themselves to form the super-hero armour for Iron Man who’s going through hard times but is perfectly capable of saving the world. His colleague James Rhodes, the War Machine, now renamed as Iron Patriot (Don Cheadle) is fully suited to protect the President of the United States.
As films approximate juvenile fantasies, it’s eerie how the world itself appears to be getting closer to science fiction itself. The idea of employing controlled robots for warfare incidentally is an ethical question that American policy makers have been debating lately. Iron Man of course is not a robot, but an unbeatable shield with incredible powers attached to its inventor, billionaire Tony Stark. This makes the super-hero the most human amongst all you’ve known. How Stark survives massive blows on his normal physical self even if inside his protective suit is the sort of question fanboys will slit your throat for asking.
I don’t know if I speak for a majority of Indians, but I didn’t grow up watching, admiring or day-dreaming about Iron Man. That childhood unconditional love, at least for me, belongs to Spiderman, Superman and Batman. This is probably why The Amazing Spiderman, The Dark Knight Rises and the Superman films (Men Of Steel is on its way) leave a far stronger impact on my muscles than this one does. But then Robert Downey Jr makes you want to replicate that admiration for Iron Man even if it’s too late for it. Or probably it is just never too late for such things. Just go for it then...
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