Iron Man is an unusual superhero. He may be festooned with gadgets and equipped with rocket-booster boots; he may also be kitted out in spectacular armour which he is able to summon to attach itself to his body at a moment’s notice. But his real superpower, at least in cinematic form, is his personality.
Of course, I’m really talking about Robert Downey Jr, the actor who plays Iron Man and his alter-ego, zillionaire inventor and industrialist Tony Stark, but as there have been no other screen Iron Men, any conflation between actor and role is surely excusable. Besides, I don’t go to the Iron Man films for the effects or the fights or the gadgets. I go for the sparky writing, the character doodles for which other superhero franchises don’t have the time or the lightness of touch: hello, Dark Knight. (As Sam Rockwell reflected last year on his part as one of the villains in Iron Man 2: “For an action movie, I did a lot of talking and a lot of acting. You can only handle so many explosions. It’s the shits-and-giggles that make it.”) And I go to the Iron Man films, like everyone else, for Robert Downey Jr. He is the series in the way that few actors, outside of Sean Connery as James Bond or Harrison Ford as Indiana Jones, have ever been.
He’s as energised and witty as ever in Iron Man 3. And his charisma is such a source of pleasure that the filmmakers have ensured he spends less time than ever in the superhero suit; they aren’t about to hide their star away in a chunk of metal for any longer than is absolutely necessary. In many scenes, he even gets to control the suit remotely, so that the audience can savour the kick of the action scenes while still enjoying Downey unencumbered by the concealing suit. The movie has some claim on being the best of the series, thanks largely to the input of its co-writer and director, Shane Black (who wrote Lethal Weapon, The Last Boy Scout and my nomination for the finest action movie of the 1990s, The Long Kiss Goodnight). Not that Jon Favreau, director of the previous films, did a bad job. But there is a Black mark, evident here particularly in scenes between Stark and one of his adversaries, the terrorist known as the Mandarin (Ben Kingsley), which the writer-director’s fans will recognise instantly for the way it introduces into action movie conventions transformative aspects like bathos, deadpan comedy and humdrum detail (Exhibit A: a joke about Croydon).
It is an inherent problem of most sequels that the protagonist is usually forced to endure the same character arc, the same life lessons, which defined their previous adventures, and Iron Man 3 doesn’t entirely sidestep this problem: once again, we have to watch Stark becoming a victim of his own hubris, and having his arrogance destabilised and then built up all over again. But the movie sensibly keeps to a minimum the scenes of Downey Jr being vulnerable. After all, where’s the fun in that? This actor’s pseudo-smug, preening complacency is novel precisely because we don’t want to see him taken down a peg or two: he’s one of the few movie braggarts who’s at his best when he’s on the top of the pile, strutting and crowing and howling at the moon. (Bill Murray is another actor who can get away with unalloyed smugness at no cost to his appeal.)
Including as it does a flashback to scenes that took place before the first Iron Man movie, Iron Man 3 gives Downey the sumptuous opportunity to play Stark in both his completely pre-PC and partly-reconstructed incarnations. No matter which situations he is plunged into, he emerges unscathed, his Robert Downey Jr-ness untainted by convention. His off-screen trajectory (which can be described approximately as “rise-and-fall-and-rise-higher-than-we-could-ever-have-imagined”) undoubtedly feeds into the pleasure of his on-screen resilience: anyone who knows what he’s been through cannot help but be thrilled at his ongoing survival. The new movie even pairs him at one point with that hoary old device, the fatherless boy in need of paternal guidance. Even that can’t dent his armour: the armour, that is, of the movie star who has found a persona which works a dream and is sticking with it.
“Iron Man 3” opens tomorrow.
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