Friday 20 December 2013

Adam's Films of the Year - No 3


It was the film that started Summer 2013 and it ended it as the best of the lot. The original Iron Man film was fresh, cocky and took a hell of a risk in Robert Downey Jnr and it turned out to be amazingly perfect casting. The sequel, in my opinion was a step backwards and after The Avengers, this was to be the first foray into Marvel's phase two programme and it needed to be special and it was. The seeds for the success can be found back in 2005, three years before Downey Jnr even put on the suit. Some of you may not remember the 'other ' Robert Downey Jnr but to put it simply he was a loose cannon, a older Charlie Sheen, or older (I don't know how old they are) anyway, he was a drug and alcohol fuelled genius who could act when he wanted to and be terrible if he wanted to. But in 2005 he was given a chance to star in a film called KISS KISS BANG BANG and if you haven't seen it, stop reading this and find it. It's a Christmas film set against seedy modern Hollywood with pulp crime influences. It was a fantastic flick and it brought together RDJ with the director Shane Black. As with most masterpieces, Kiss Kiss didn't do well initially but found its feet on home DVD and fast forwarding to 2013, they were reunited once more. You may think Tony Stark had good dialogue as is but with Black's involvement, it went to another level. Another plus was the introduction of the villain, The Mandarin. I personally found the arc of this character to be genius but sole hardcore comic fans balked at the twist. If you don't read the comics, which I don't, then I think you'd side with me. If it weren't for the continuation of the Marvel universe, I'd say this placed a neat bow on the trilogy but as Iron Man AND RDJ are both retuning for Avengers 2.0, it will be a strange thing to undo all the good work of this film. Anyway, Tony Stark makes it to No3 and this goes next to other comic book films such as X2, The Dark Knight and Spider-Man 2 as sequels that were better than their originals.

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