Karina on SpoutBlog

Interesting. David Poland, who is not crazy about Iron Man (”I just wanted a character who actually dealt with the obvious demons that he overcomes… and not just another really, really cool suit of CG armor”) posits that the fact that other critics are crazy about the film (it’s currently at 86% on Rotten Tomatoes) might be a sign that it’s not going to connect with audiences:

This appears to be the Pass movie of the early summer for critics. Is it because of Downey or the middle-aged hero or talk about a huge opening or the use of the Middle East and the half-ass political arguments of the film that play out hypocritically but pay active lip service to liberals… I don’t know.

All I do know is that when film critics are the ones identifying with your superhero, you may be being successful with the wrong demo for mega-bucks… which is all the film producers wanted in the first place.

Those “half-ass political arguments” feature prominently in each of the film’s serious reviews, both negative and positive. Todd McCarthy cheerfully commended director Jon Favreau in his rave for having “found a sure-fire way to make money with a modern Middle East war movie: Just send a Marvel superhero into the fray to kick some insurgent butt.” But for David Denby, Iron Man’s Trojan Horse smuggling of the ideas and iconography of the current war is the film’s biggest sin:

…the freelance fanatics, or whatever they are, waterboard Tony Stark, which, considering what some American interrogators and their surrogates have done to suspects recently, is enraging to watch. Such are the ways of pop: we cast our sins onto others. The complaint sounds a little wan, but it’s worth noting that, possibly, more Americans will see this dunderheaded fantasia on its opening weekend than have seen all the features and documentaries that have labored to show what’s happening in Iraq and on the home front.

David Edelstein, who “loved it,” makes an interesting point about a certain action blockbuster tradition, wherein mass market entertainments “pick up on bad vibes in the air and transform them into something that lets us sleep better at night.” If amelioration of collective guilt is truly what Iron Man is up to, then Poland may have a point. If there’s anything certain about our pop cultural moment, it’s that the masses don’t want “bad vibes” to be “transformed”––that would require having to acknowledge that the “vibes” ever existed.