Grade:        C

Moral:        “We’re iron mongers.”

Place Iron Man somewhere between Transformers and Batman Begins: that is, it certainly doesn’t make your eyes bleed or your brain wail for mercy, but it’s still too cheekily self-aware of its origins to be truly remarkable. Its modus operandi clearly has it set to charm and stupefy first and intrigue second, but, all the same, it’s reason enough for celebration that the movie is breezily witty, stupendously acted, and never egregiously stupid. Still, lest we forget that comic-book flicks can’t be light and meaty (Sam Raimi pulled it off with his second “Spider-Man” adaptation, right after the boring one and before the botched one), Iron Man ultimately leaves with the worst kind of ‘good’ impression: it’s good enough only to imply that it could’ve been better. It could’ve been resoundingly phenomenal (like the Blade Runner – cum – gothic psychodrama of, again, Batman Begins, which only grows in stature with time), but instead it’s winning mainly by dint of it not shooting itself in the face.

These new Marvel adaptations seem to have embraced the ‘by and for the fans’ approach, nearly to the point of pushing the rest of us out into the cold. This is most likely traceable back to the failure of Ang Lee’s The Hulk, a noble experiment for sure, but watching it, alas, is akin to being beaten to death with a soggy baseball bat. Thus, the new motto is ‘damn experimentation, full formula ahead!’ Which isn’t to say that Iron Man is wholly entrapped in a cookie-cutter outline, but its sparks of insouciant glee do feel cramped by the clearcut cues of a movie never daring to shoot for the moon. Further, the real punctum of these movies seem to be their level of insider cognizance: I always feel like I’m missing out on mountains of esoterica being pitched at the die-hards, whereas us comic-book plebes can only munch on the crumbs of the baseline plot. The sign of a great comic-book movie, perhaps best exemplified by going all the way back to Superman, is that it’s a fully realized adaptation, not a supplement, whereas the disease of our meta-masturbation culture is that nothing can be fully realized and, instead, must rely on codes and referents from a library of other texts. Emotion and expression are boring. Reflexivity and metafiction are cool.

Granted, not admitting to laughing and, on a narrow level, enjoying Iron Man would be an act of dishonesty, and it didn’t piss me the fuck off like other recent pop-culture product (again, Transformers: I still have welts on my soul). But, likewise, to admit to being moved by it, or finding it particularly exciting, even on a visceral level, would likewise be dishonest. It’s just too squinched, too trepidatiously crafted by reverent fans utterly terrified of elbowing it in interesting directions. The best comic-movie I’ve ever seen was again from Raimi – his little seen, quickly forgotten Darkman – mainly because it was a work of fearless psychopathy, a kind of spaghetti comic-book confection that exploded the genre to new heights. Then again, perhaps its success stemmed from the simple fact that it wasn’t actually a comic-book adaptation, but was an original story, intended from the get-go to be cinematic. Iron Man, for all its admittedly not-dumb humor and plotting, feels burdened by itself, as if it’s got to carry that weight like a dutiful little Marvel adaptation should. Really though, it's a sign of the times that we’re all patting each other on the back just because a summer blockbuster came out that doesn’t suck.