Daily Archives: April 30, 2013

Iron Man 3

Film Reviews

Crackerjack popcorn entertainment done overwhelmingly right, Iron Man 3 is a robust example of what Hollywood can do right when it puts its mind to it — bringing tremendous resources to bear upon a larger-than-life story, entrusting it to smart, capable people, and turning them loose with fully invested confidence. A fun ride brimming with nice character details that fit together in comfortable and occasionally savvy ways, writer-director Shane Black takes over the franchise reins with a breezy aplomb, delivering a movie packed with both thrills and amusement.

Taking place in the unfolding Marvel superhero universe after the events of last year’s The Avengers, the film finds billionaire industrialist and erstwhile playboy Tony Stark (Robert Downey, Jr.) struggling not so much with faithfulness as a properly apportioned sense of time commitment with his now-steady squeeze, new Stark Industries chief Pepper Potts (Gwyneth Paltrow).

A string of bombings by a media-manipulating terrorist known as the Mandarin (Ben Kingsley) has left intelligence agencies baffled, owing to their lack of forensic evidence left behind. Meanwhile, inventor turned magnate Aldrich Killian (Guy Pearce) has — perverting the research of Maya Hansen (Rebecca Hall), an old one-night stand of Stark’s — figured out a way to regenerate missing limbs, and entered into a shady and unsafe program involving unwitting injured war veterans. Complications, explosions and wisecracks ensue.

As embodied by Downey, Stark is brash, cocksure and quip-happy — not a superhero who wears his cloak (or in this case suit) heavily, but instead with a confident, forward-leaning pleasure. In this regard, while the first film was released five years ago almost to the day, still during the tenure of President Bush, Stark can be seen as a metaphor for a re-energized American patriotism, shaken free from doubts and missteps of the early millennium, and pointed upward and onward with vigor and clarity of purpose. The subsequent sequels have each picked up on this theme to varying degrees (“Failure is the fog through which we glimpse triumph,” Iron Man 3 at one point asserts), and after his trusted former bodyguard Happy Hogan (Jon Favreau) is injured in a blast, Stark even delivers a come-and-get-it address directly to the Mandarin (“No politics — this is just good, old-fashioned revenge”), giving out his home address on live television.

Black, working from a screenplay co-written with Drew Pearce, deftly walks the line between being true to his established leading man and telling a story more rooted in a post-Avengers world. References abound to the “events in New York,” but Stark also wears a sheen of post-traumatic stress disorder that seems properly to scale, and sized to his own ego and peccadillos. The biggest, most pleasant surprise of Iron Man 3, however, may be how well the action filmmaking works. Black — in a huge step up, budget-wise, from his only other directing credit, 2005’s Kiss Kiss Bang Bang — imparts a nice sense of spatial recognition throughout, and all of the set pieces seem to fit smartly within the story, instead of as adjunct showcases for CGI gimmickry.

It’s true that Stark’s friendship and alliance with James Rhodes (Don Cheadle), the government-outfitted War Machine, now officially rebranded as the Iron Patriot, is handled in more or less functional strokes. And the explanation and deployment of Stark’s stockpiled Iron Man army is, well, if not a cheat then sometimes seemingly a bit of a winking narrative fix.

But the performances here are highly enjoyable (in addition to the regulars, young Ty Simpkins scores highly as Harley, a kid whom Stark befriends), and the rakish Iron Man 3 accomplishes the rare three-quel feat of actually leaving you wanting even more from a franchise. (Disney, PG-13, 129 minutes)

Manhunt: The Inside Story of the Hunt for Osama bin Laden

Film Reviews


The story at the core of this curiously directed and somewhat misleadingly titled documentary — an adaptation of Peter Bergen’s excellent, bestselling book — is an innately fascinating one. Unfortunately, as either a primer on America’s terrorist takedown infrastructure or a megaphone for the insights of the (many female) analysts who helped untangle the ambiguity of information in aid of that cause, director Greg Barker’s messy Manhunt: The Inside Story of the Hunt for Osama bin Laden, premiering May 1 on HBO, doesn’t forcefully connect, and as such remains a frustrating viewing experience.



The story of the ALEC Station group — the first CIA team tasked with finding bin Laden, formed in 1995 — is an engrossing one, and the putative leaping-off point for this nonfiction inquiry, whose strongest selling point may be the array of direct interviews with these former intelligence analysts. The regret and guilt is evident on the officers’ faces as they recall the weeks following the September 11, 2001 terror attacks, for which they were suddenly “responsible” in the words of many pundits outside of government and several voices within it — even though their clear warnings about bin Laden had either gone largely unheeded and/or lacked operational intel. There was a “foundational change in organization” post-September 11, of course, and sharing information rather than compartmentalizing it became the de facto governmental position.

Bergen’s book, while comprehensive, is far from unwieldy, even as it chronicles bin Laden’s rise from his tangles with the Soviet Union in Afghanistan up through bombings on the USS Cole and American embassies. The movie version of Manhunt, on the other hand, is a thicket of distracted impulses, themes and half-litigated theses. While analyst interviewees like Cindy Storer and Barbara Sude, as well as Marty Martin, the former senior CIA case officer in the Middle East who became the day-to-day manager of the organization’s worldwide operations against al Qaeda, give Manhunt an undeniable insider authenticity, the movie ping-pongs from an early, 1990s study of Al Qaeda (quite interesting) to the terror attacks and the CIA’s embrace of black site foreign prisons (“Let’s just say boutique locations,” says one subject), before alighting back on Bergen and Peter Arnett’s March 1997 CNN interview with bin Laden, in which he first formalized his declaration of war on the United States.

Other parts of the film cover CIA analysts moving on to work as “targeting officers” in various war theaters (Nada Bakos, for instance, heads to Iraq, where she spends so much time hunting brutal Al Qaeda in Iraq emissary Abu Musab al-Zarqawi that soldiers jokingly start referring to him as her boyfriend). There’s trenchant analysis buried amidst these competing threads, as when retired Army General Stanley McChrystal says of the United States in general, “We haven’t taken the time to not be blind, deaf and dumb in areas of the world that matter to us.”

But Manhunt can’t decide if it wants to tell a history of Al Qaeda, the story of the overhaul of the American security and spying apparatuses post-September 11, the story of the enhanced interrogation/torture debate and American foreign policy adventurism more broadly, or just the Abbottabad OBL raid. The success of the book — distilling the essence of each of these strands, and connecting them — proves too difficult a lift for Barker, who employs a couple empty directorial tricks to try to enliven a graphic depiction of the Al Qaeda terrorist network, but doesn’t winnow his sources effectively. I wouldn’t necessarily recommend against anyone watching Manhunt. But there are also better resources — starting with Bergen’s tome, and inclusive of Kathryn Bigelow’s Zero Dark Thirty — that chronicle the search for bin Laden from 2001 until his death. For the full, original review, from ShockYa, click here. (HBO Films, unrated, 102 minutes)