I’m so glad I rarely, if ever, see movies in theaters, because I’m already a cranky old man, and I find myself getting outraged over money I might theoretically have spent to see it in a theater instead of watching the DVD for next to nothing.
I also wonder if I might not be completely out of touch with what constitutes an entertaining film, because I thought Iron Man was really boring. It made tons of money, and it got good reviews. I mean, it got good reviews beyond the “not bad for a super-hero movie” standard, almost like it was a film, or something.
I don’t really understand that. Aside from a cast with several Oscar winners and nominees and a script with snappier dialogue than usual (which isn’t a very high bar to vault over), I thought it was just as laborious as every other recent movie based on a super-hero property. Maybe I’m too nostalgic for the economy with which super-hero origin stories were originally told, but it seemed like it took forever for Tony Stark to do anything. Given the apparent complexity of the technology, I guess that’s fair, but had nobody ever heard of the montage? Or would that have been too cheesy for a movie about a drunken billionaire with a magnet in his sternum? (Of course, such economical measures might have resulted in the elimination of one of my favorite characters, the robot that kept spraying fire suppressant. I want a spin-off franchise, and I want it now.)
Why do all of these movies seem to plod? Why do they all seem so methodical and overly reverent when they should be snappy and fast-paced and fun?