By The Butcher
You love ’em, he hates ’em! The Butcher carves up your favourite films, and this week, he applies his sharpened cleaver to Jon Favreau’s game-changing, franchise-starting 2008 superhero classic Iron Man, starring Robert Downey Jr., Gwyneth Paltrow, Terrence Howard and Jeff Bridges.
The new trailer for Avengers: Doomsday has just “dropped”! Cue fan-boy-and-girl shrieking and carry-on not seen since, well, Avengers: Endgame hit cinemas. After the tank-job that is Supergirl, however, The Butcher is hoping (hoping, hoping, hoping) that the superhero flick might very soon experience its own endgame. Haven’t we all had enough? All those capes and wisecracks? Haven’t we had enough? The Butcher sure as shit has…
And all of this Marvel Studios, Avengers bullshit started with Iron Man back in 2008. Thanks to this arrogant prick in the red and yellow space-suit-thingy, we’ve now had about a hundred movies featuring characters from The Marvel Universe, all “interconnected” in apparently ingenious ways (they all know each other…big deal!), and allegedly proving that comic book movies can appeal to people of all ages, and aspire to hitherto unseen levels of cinematic sophistication. Yeah, whatever.
The Butcher used to watch Super Friends on a Saturday morning when he was an angry, destructive, self-centred child (hey, not much has changed!), and these various “phases” of movies from Marvel aren’t that much more impressive. At least you could learn how not to behave by watching Super Friends – you know, with all its crappy messages about washing your hands and being nice to people and stuff.
Anyway, thanks to the success of Iron Man, Marvel was encouraged to kick off with all of its other movies, meaning that these flicks are all basically just rotten fruit from a poisonous tree. Directed by notorious yo-yo dieter, Jon Favreau, Iron Man is certainly at the flabbier end of his directorial spectrum, coming over-stuffed with characters, and climaxing with a boring machine-on-machine battle straight out of Transformers.
Also, Jeff Bridges looks absolutely shithouse bald, Gwyneth Paltrow seems like she’s half-asleep, and the guy that is apparently so amazing – that one-time drug monkey, Robert Downey Jr. – is actually just doing what he’s done in all of his other films. The wisecracking, the insufferably obvious arrogance, speaking as if someone has hit the fast-forward button – many will argue that this is all in the service of the character of Tony Stark, who is a first-order poseur, but it’s really just Robert Downey Jr. playing himself.
Go through all of his films, and it becomes abundantly clear: the guy has no range. There’s more variety in his 1980s bathroom’s medicine cabinet! And no, The Butcher is not even impressed for one single second that Robert Downey Jr. got an Oscar for his “performance” in Christopher Nolan’s boring-as-batshit bomb Oppenheimer. Note that Sandra Bullock has an Oscar too…end of discussion.
And Robert Downey Jr. is only one part of the rusty, tinny, barely-working machine that is Iron Man. Straight to the scrap yard, shellhead!
