Iron Man 3

Directed by Shane Black

Written by Drew Pearce and Shane Black

Based on characters created by Stan Lee, Don Heck, Larry Lieber, and Jack Kirby, and based on the Extremis storyline by Warren Ellis and Adi Granov

            Marvel Phase Two starts here.  And after Iron Man 2, it’s probably right to be wary of how exactly it would be starting.  Whereas most superhero movies peak in their second installment, Iron Man was one of the few to take a significant dip in its first sequel.  And with a change of directors rarely being beneficial, it was right to come in tenuously.  But Iron Man 3 comes in and blows all expectations away to make something incredible.

            Tony Stark (portrayed, as ever, by Robert Downey Jr.) is shaken up after the events of The Avengers.  He’s retreated into his garage, has upgraded the Iron Man suit all the way up to Mark 42, and he’s suffering from panic attacks.  But when a terrorist leader called The Mandarin (Ben Kingsley) threatens America with human bombs, he has to suit up again and stop him.

            What’s really striking about this movie is how, with a new director and new writers, it’s very tonally different from the first two.  The story is darker, as is some of the violence, and, notably, this movie does not feature another villain in another armor to match up against Iron Man.  In fact, while the first two villains had grudges against Tony Stark, The Mandarin is basically disinterested in Iron Man as opposed to getting his own plans done.  And the villain’s plan seems like nothing more than nonsense until Tony starts unraveling the mystery.  Just like Shane Black’s own Kiss Kiss Bang Bang, this is almost more of a mystery, and takes Tony out of his armor and out of his element.  And also like that movie, Iron Man 3 is really funny.  There’s no doubt that the entire Marvelverse series has had plenty of comic moments, but IM3 brings the laughs constantly, mixing slapstick with witty dialogue.  Tony is always the likeable jerk, and man, he can be the jerk here, but the pure audacity of what he’s saying makes you laugh.  There is one scene, featuring an Iron Man fanboy, that could have been cut, but generally, nothing is sacrificed by the focus on comedy.

            Certainly not the action.  Yes, the biggest action scenes have been shown plenty in the trailer.  This makes them no less impressive.  There is definitely a feeling that things have to be stepped up to match The Avengers, and they have been.  CGI mixes with what appears to be practical effects.  When the movie blows things up, it does it well, and everything culminates in a great final battle scene.  If 2’s final battle against Whiplash felt like an anti-climax, 3’s does not stop until it knows damn well that everybody watching will be happy with the results.  This is a pure fight that pushes Tony and his suits of armor to the furthest level of their abilities.
            And finally, the biggest praise I can give Iron Man 3: it does not feel like a lead-up to Avengers 2.  It does not constantly wink and nod to comic book lore.  And best of all, it does not follow the same story points as the comic.  These are things we’ve become so used to.  Every comics fan knew that Bane was going to break Batman’s back, we knew that Bucky was going to die, hell, we even know that Gwen Stacy is going to die.  And suddenly in Iron Man 3, these feelings of comfort, of knowing what’s going to happen, of smiling when somebody says a name that means something in the comics, are ripped away.  For once, we’re on the same level as your average viewer, and it feels good.  I can walk out of the theater being genuinely and pleasantly surprised at the direction the movie took.

            If this is the direction Phase Two is going in, then I’m even more excited for what’s coming next.  A movie that challenges the Marvel formula, challenges what comic readers think they know, and most importantly of all, is independent from anything that might come in the future.  Even the after-credits scene (and yes, there is one) isn’t a teasing nod to what comes next but a humorous conclusion to the movie that feels far more worthwhile than seeing Nick Fury or Thor’s hammer.

Batman: The Black Mirror

Written by Scott Snyder

Art by Jock and Francesco Francavilla

            Earlier, when I reviewed Severed, I explained that I wasn’t a Scott Snyder fan yet, that I just didn’t quite get it.  Reading another volume of American Vampire got me closer.  But The Black Mirror has made me understand, with one of the Batman tales that should end up on any fan’s bookshelf.

            Taking place during the time where Bruce Wayne is back from the dead but Dick Grayson is still Batman, The Black Mirror follows several Batman cases.  Dick has to deal with a black market dealer who specializes in items from Gotham’s villains, a killer whale that ends up in a bank lobby and the Joker escaping.  At the same time, Commissioner Gordon’s son, James, is in town—a son who may or may not be a psychotic killer.

            It is the latter story that’s truly the winner of the book.  Don’t get me wrong, the Batman cases are extremely well done.  The second story, Hungry City, shows just how well Snyder writes mystery.  Nobody is who they seem they are, you’re not sure who you can trust, and you’re not quite satisfied with the resolution, not because of any failure of the writer, but because that’s just how things turn out.  But the story of James Gordon, which also brings up Jim Gordon’s past cases, turns things up.  Nowhere is this better than a tense conversation between father and son in a diner.  Of all the Gotham setpieces possible, you wouldn’t think a random diner would be one of the showcases, but it’s very memorable and leaves you hanging on until the final page.

            In a way, Commissioner Gordon is really the star of this book.  Batman solves some big cases, and we get a look at the different between Dick Grayson and Bruce Wayne behind the cape and cowl.  But Gordon is one of those characters who’s become such a part of the Batman mythos that it’s easy to push him to the side, easy to have him do little besides tell Batman what the cops know.  Snyder does not go the easy route here.  Gordon is a man who’s been a police officer far too long, and yet, for the many, many points in his life where he should have finally hit his breaking point, he’s still around.  He’s still trying to solve cases that have been forgotten or trying to improve the worst city in America just a little bit.  And yet again, this book gets so close to hitting that breaking point, but it’s the decisions that Gordon is forced to make in the very end that show just the kind of man he is.

            Consider The Black Mirror to be an instant addition to the must-read Batman stories.  We have other stories to tell us about Batman or the relationship between Batman and the Joker.  We have this story to tell us about Commissioner Gordon.

Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Secret History of the Foot Clan

Written by Mateus Santolouco and Erik Burnham

Art by Mateus Santolouco

            No TMNT villain is more notable than Oroku Saki, aka The Shredder.  And with IDW’s recent reboot of the Turtles re-introducing him, it only makes sense to dive into his history.

            Secret History of the Foot Clan takes place in two times.  In the present, a researcher has found vital information about the Foot Clan’s past, which is information that both Shredder and the Turtles want.  In Feudal Japan, an apparently immortal ninja leader is killed off, but a witch’s curse is placed on his assassins – a curse which causes the leader to be reincarnated in the body of a boy named Oroku Saki.

            Oh yes, I should point out a few things about this reboot and my information of it.  For one, I’ve only read the first two story arcs, neither of which introduced the Shredder.  This does mean that I am obviously missing a part of this book.  Although it’s possible to pick up and read, which I did, you’re still going to be missing a piece of the puzzle.  Most of the information you need is fairly obviously given, though.  And also, in this version, the Turtles are reincarnated versions of ninja warriors of the past.  Don’t give me that look.  It’s a comic, and if you’re willing to accept that a strange radioactive substance can turn ordinary turtles into human-sized, talking turtles, you can believe they could be reincarnated ninjas.

            With the formalities out of the way, I can talk about the book itself, and it is a hell of a ride.  The events in ancient Japan both start to reveal certain things about the new TMNT world that IDW is creating while also showing that this is not your ordinary “start of darkness” tale.  If you’re accepting a good person who somehow gets torn down into a villain, well, it’s not here.  The Shredder is the Shredder, he has always been the Shredder, he always will be the Shredder.  What’s more fascinating is to see a Shredder unleashed.  If you’re mainly familiar with the 90s cartoon, where Shredder was a comic lapdog to Krang, this isn’t him.  This is a brutal Shredder willing to do whatever he has to do to win.  And this also happens in the present day, which is filled with kinetic action sequences.  Everything is paced perfectly, making it a page-turner during the action and slowing it down just right when it gets to the exposition.  Not screeching it to a halt, but giving you a little relaxation before the next car chase or ninja battle.

            If you’re not already reading IDW’s TMNT series, you might not get everything you should out of Secret History of the Foot Clan.  On the other hand, if you read this, you’ll definitely be wanting to read their TMNT series afterwards.  Secret History is a great place to get on this new series.

Thor

Directed by Kenneth Branagh

Written by Ashley Miller, Zack Stentz, Don Payne, J. Michael Straczynski, and Mark Protosevich

Based on characters created by Stan Lee, Larry Lieber, and Jack Kirby

            Thor is definitely a different kind of origin.  After all, there’s very little origin for Thor unless you want to go into the very silly Don Blake plotline (which gets an obligatory nod in this movie).  Instead, Thor is just the god of thunder, son of Odin, and the origin here is more about Thor turning from a headstrong, arrogant prince into a hero worthy of the Avengers, along with starting his romance with Jane Foster.

            It’s rather a disappointment that Chris Hemsworth has not gotten more action/fantasy work, because he very naturally takes to the role here.  Given Thor’s sometimes silly dialogue, it can be a tough thing for anybody to pull off, and yet every scene he is just naturally Thor.  He says every line with conviction, he brings the hammer down like he means it, and when the script calls for pratfalls, well, he gives a nice pratfall.  And he’s perfectly matched against Tom Hiddleston’s Loki.  Loki is definitely an interesting hero among the Avengers movies simply because he has his sympathetic side.  All he really wants is Odin’s approval, and he just doesn’t know quite how to get it.  Maybe destroying a small New Mexico town is not quite the best way to do it.

            Thor is a movie with two worlds, and in a sense, this kind of splits the movie.  On the one side, you have Asgard, with its incredible CGI landscape and its high drama.  Branagh is probably most famous for his Shakespeare adaptations, and you can feel the hints of Shakespearean drama here.  The Asgard scenes are battles of royalty, sons trying to find their place in the world, a father who is becoming weak, and an enemy that threatens to attack, with three people having three different opinions on how the enemy should be dealt with.  In the other world, you have New Mexico, land of Kat Dennings’ Darcy making silly quips, Thor getting tasered, and product placement.  I’m sure there is product placement in the other Marvel movies, but nothing is quite as notable as the 7/11 and Dr. Pepper vending machine in this movie.  Yes, Asgard is definitely the real star of the movie, but that doesn’t mean that New Mexico doesn’t have its charms.  After Iron Man was in California, this shows that Marvel movies can really take place anywhere, not just in New York City.  And there is nowhere as opposite to NYC as a small town where a hammer that nobody can move is the biggest event ever, with people tying it to a pickup truck to try to get it out, and laughing when they fail.  It’s a different atmosphere from any other Marvel movie, Avengersverse or not, and even with its roughness, you can’t help but appreciate it.

            And this is a rough movie.  The slapstick and the high drama don’t meld.  The early action scenes are too visually dark and too frenetic, making the comprehension of what’s going on difficult.  And the romance plot between Thor and Jane Foster is missing a step.  It’s not fractured, it’s just missing a single piece that you notice is missing.  But for these problems, Thor still comes out enjoyable.  It meshes action, comedy, romance, and fantasy all together, and you can hear the gears grind from time to time, but it’s still funny and still exciting.

Iron Man 2

Directed by Jon Favreau

Written by Justin Theroux

            It makes a lot of sense that Iron Man 2 was the only sequel before Avengers.  Iron Man had been a huge success, the hype for Thor and Captain America still needed to be built, so put their hammer and shield in Iron Man 2 and get people even more familiarized with the world of Tony Stark.  As a movie, however, Iron Man 2 is mixed.  I think it’s good, but, well, it has some significant flaws.

            But let’s start with those good parts.  First off, again, we have some fine acting.  As usual, everybody who was good in the first Iron Man is still good here.  The replacement of Terrence Howard with Don Cheadle is something I’m indecisive on.  Before re-watching, I thought that Cheadle was more over-the-top than Howard.  But really, Cheadle is just as subdued, he just has a little more screen presence, and it helps that he gets to put on the War Machine armor.  Rhodey is far more memorable when his big scene isn’t in a control room, but in fights against Tony Stark and a group of villain-controlled Stark armor.  Mickey Rourke as Whiplash gives a very subtle and quiet performance.  Later interviews had him saying that he was angry that much of his role was cut when he did so much for it, such as learning Russian, and you can’t help but feel that there is more here that’s not being seen.  The first appearance of Scarlett Johansson as Black Widow is great, and provides one of the best action scenes of the movie.  But they all end up getting overshadowed by Sam Rockwell as Justin Hammer.  He isn’t just over-the-top, he’s somewhere a thousand miles above the top.  It’s ultimately rather funny that his character has very little effect on the plot, but I wouldn’t dare remove him from the movie.

            And again, we have some great action scenes, particularly in meshing the action with comedy.  We’re getting more towards that Marvel-style of having something really awesome followed by something that makes the audience laugh.  Black Widow defeats a bunch of guards while Happy struggles with just one.  The sequence of Tony being chased by a troop of rip-offs of his tech gets the tension lightened when their flying causes a parking garage full of car alarms to go off.  And in-between the action, Iron Man 2 does tackle some serious themes.  The idea of what would happen if somebody like Iron Man existed in the real world, and how the military would react to that, is explored, and leads to some realism aspects that show up in the future Marvel films.  And Tony’s dying also flirts with his comic book alcoholism, but sadly doesn’t quite follow through on it.

            And that’s one of the big flaws of Iron Man 2.  For its serious themes, the movie can’t quite handle them, probably because it’s focused on being a summer blockbuster.  When Tony gets drunk at a party, it’s played for laughs, and there’s very little threat for the audience that Tony will actually die when his armor starts killing him.  And the solution to the problem is done in a second act that just slows the movie down too much.  There’s nothing particularly interesting about having Tony sit in a lab, and the solution ends up getting found and made too easily.  And we have some major Avengers foreshadowing that doesn’t work.  It’s not so much nodding towards the bigger universe Marvel’s developing as pointing at it with big glowing signs.  And finally, there’s the final battle with Whiplash.  After the fight against the drones manages to wow, you expect big things when Whiplash drops down, only to have him defeated in the span of a few seconds with a blatantly obvious Chekhov’s gun.  It leaves you with a “That was it?” feeling.

            Still, Iron Man 2 isn’t bad.  It’s quite enjoyable and good.  It’s just not as good as it could’ve been.  You can feel it wanting to be that good, it just stumbles in several key places.

The Incredible Hulk

Directed by Louis Leterrie

Written by Zak Penn

            The Incredible Hulk has this weird place in the Avengersverse.  On the one hand, it is undoubtedly a part of the movie universe, what with its links to Stark Enterprise and even featuring a Robert Downey Jr. cameo.  On the other hand, it still acts like it’s partially a sequel to Ang Lee’s 2003 Hulk movie and the references to Iron Man could have been excised without losing anything.  And there’s the Bruce Banner problem.

            Here’s the thing: Edward Norton’s portrayal of Bruce Banner is perfectly fine.  It is no Mark Ruffalo.  This does not mean it’s worse than Mark Ruffalo’s performance.  The problem is that they’re portraying different versions of the same character.  Ruffalo is in a movie that leans more towards the fun side of things, and this gives him a character that hides under quirks and snarkiness, but still has a darkness within.  Norton is in a slightly darker movie, so he focuses on the darker parts of Bruce.  He’s quiet, reserved, and vulnerable, which creates a perfect contrast to a brutal Hulk who only shows his own vulnerability during one scene with Betty Ross.  At the end of the day, there’s no best performance here.  It’s like debating which of two writers better wrote a comic if both of their runs were great.  They might’ve written the main character in completely different ways, but they’re still doing good writing.

            It’s probably not fair here to say that Incredible Hulk is a very action-focused movie.  After all, for all the quiet details that make the Marvel movies what they are, they’re all action movies at the center.  And this movie has plenty of quiet scenes.  In fact, its non-action scenes sometimes lean towards non-verbal, with long sequences of no dialogue.  But these quieter scenes also feel like transition scenes.  The non-action scenes in the other Marvel movies tend to be core to the characters, while the scenes here focus on moving the plot to the next action scene.  Not necessarily in a bad manner.  You’re not looking at your watch, waiting for the next action scene.  You’re just not going to remember every moment from these scenes at the end of the day.

What makes Incredible Hulk’s action particularly stand out is probably the fact that it’s like they wrote it as an apology to the 2003 movie’s poorly lit action scenes and its poorly computer generated Hulk.  The Hulk here definitely has more details, more to him.  He’s not quite the Hulk from Avengers.  He doesn’t have the full weight of him, the full details.  He’s getting there, but it’s not perfect.  The action itself is over-the-top in the best way.  Things blow up, Hulk smashes things.  There’s enough innovation in the scenery and what Hulk does (such as using a modern art structure as a makeshift shield) to keep things interesting.  What’s striking is that, while the first two fight scenes are fairly fun, the final one is almost too violent, in an out-of-place way.  It’s a knock-down, drag-out brawl between Hulk and Abomination, and involves Hulk stabbing Abomination and brutally choking him.  If there’s any marker that the Avengers tone wasn’t set with this movie, this is it.

The Incredible Hulk is still a rather odd beast at the end of the day.  Its tone isn’t there, its sequel hooks feel out of place, and The Avengers just acts like it’s the movie reintroducing Hulk.  It ends up a little confused, but getting towards that comic book style.  If you missed it in the middle of the summer battle between Iron Man and The Dark Knight, now’s the time to come back and have a little mindless fun.

Happy!

Written by Grant Morrison

Art by Darick Robertson

            There are essentially two sides to Grant Morrison.  There’s the borderline incomprehensible side that writes from the depths of comics history and makes work like Batman RIP and Final Crisis that you know is good, you just don’t know what the hell is happening.  Then there’s the side that makes more comprehensible stuff that is easier to identify as good, like All-Star Superman, Batman Inc., and Happy!  But just because he’s writing something comprehensible doesn’t mean it isn’t a little bit insane.

            Happy! is about Nick Sax, a former detective who’s now a hitman.  He’s hired by a mysterious figure known only as Blue to kill off a trio of mob brothers, but he also kills a fourth brother there who turns out to have the only password to get a mob fortune.  And he’s passed that password on to Nick, who’s now being hunted down for it.  Oh, and also, Nick has started seeing a small, blue, flying, talking horse.  Did I forget to mention that little detail?

            Yes, by most of the story, Happy! is a fairly standard mob tale.  The world is full of dirty cops, disgusting crimes, and a ton of language.  This book doesn’t so much use F-bombs as an F-machine-gun.  It’s easily passed twenty uses of it by the first three pages, not counting all the other language it uses.  This is a dark, dark book.  That happens to star a cartoon horse named Happy.  Robertson captures this perfectly in his art, making Happy look notably out of place in the dark world he lives in, but no less important to the story.  Nick just wants to get away from the city as fast as possible before he’s tortured or killed.  Happy wants him to save a girl named Hailey.  And yes, it does feature some of the standard redemption tropes, but this is not a tale of redemption.

            You ultimately get the feeling that Nick can’t really be redeemed.  And this has nothing to do with his actions in the world so much as it has to do with the world itself.  One particularly effective scene has a flashback that goes from the beginning of Nick’s cop career to the wreck that he is now, and we see exactly how he became himself.  He has choices to change along the way, but he’s stuck in a crapsack world and there’s no getting out of that.  And ultimately, the final choice he has to make is doing one good thing that will ultimately make the smallest of differences in the world, but it’s what he has to do.  And if he has to do it at the urging of a cartoon horse, well, so be it.

Grant Morrison has been writing relatively lighter fare in recent years, since he’s been doing work at DC, but with Happy! at Image, he is unleashed.  Maybe not in the full-on craziness that he’s sometimes shown, but in terms of making an oppressively dark world, oh yes.  Happy! takes a standard premise and makes it madcap and memorable.  This is the Grant Morrison I love.