Iron Man

Billionaire Bad, Movie Bad, Case Closed

Superhero/Action ‧ 126 minutes ‧ PG-13 ‧ 2008 ‧ 4 min read

"I am Iron Man."

Iron Man (2008) is the film that started what would become the unstoppable MCU machine. Directed by Jon Favreau and starring Robert Downey Jr., Gwyneth Paltrow, Terrence Howard, and Jeff Bridges, it tells a story everyone knows by now: billionaire weapons manufacturer and objectively terrible person Tony Stark gets captured, watches his own tech used to kill people, and claws his way out as Iron Man.

And still, almost two decades later, the discourse around this film is dumber than it has any right to be. Because apparently the thing “cinephiles” can't forgive Tony Stark for isn't the weapons dealing, isn't the war profiteering, isn't any of the actual sins this movie hands him on a silver platter in act one. It's that he's rich. Billionaire bad, movie bad, case closed.

Nobody's dragging Captain America for being a blonde, blue-eyed product of a literal government eugenics program. Nobody's picking apart Thor for turning a mythology that white nationalists have spent decades trying to claim as their own into a Saturday matinee blockbuster. Tony gets the character assassination for having a bank account.

None of this is a defense of the film's politics. This is a movie where an American weapons contractor watches his own missiles fired at American troops by the same militants he sold them to. But people who try to use this one film as proof of “American imperialism” need to start growing some brain cells.

So the actual review, underneath all of that? It's good. We knew that in '08. We still know it now. Downey Jr.'s performance carries the film's tonal balancing act, cracking jokes one scene and confronting the human cost of his own business the next, and Favreau's willingness to let the cast improvise gives the whole thing a looseness most superhero origin stories never bother to earn.

The politics aren't the flaw people want them to be, and if anything they're the reason the film still has teeth almost two decades later. What holds it back from greatness isn't Tony Stark. It's everything the MCU built on top of him, which made them forget what made this one work in the first place. Iron Man gets a 4.5 out of 5.

(Nobody who calls this movie fascist has actually watched the third act.)