Iron Man

Talk about boy's toys!

That's all anyone really needs to know about Marvel comic-book adaptation Iron Man, brought to the big screen by director Jon Favreau. Look carefully enough, though, and there's a story about technological genius and arms manufacturer Tony Stark (Robert Downey Jr.) getting kidnapped in Afghanistan and building a supercomputer suit to bust his way out, becoming a quasi-superhero in the process. Look carefully, mind.

It's not just the massive amount of guns, rockets, jeeps and automated armour suits that make this film such an enthusiastic endorsement of boys and their toys. Tony Stark – though an adult and CEO of the company founded by his equally brilliant father – has barely grown up beyond the age of fifteen. He's a hyperactive little rich boy who has been allowed to carry on playing (and spending) without ever really having to worry. His assistant, Pepper Potts (Gwyneth Paltrow), is one of only two female characters of note, the other being compulsory 'almost-unpatriotic-but-cute-journalist-asking-difficult-yet-ignored-questions'. When he tells Potts that he doesn't have anyone else to trust, it's painfully true – this man can't form relationships with other people, let alone with women; he's too busy talking to the AI robots in his workshop. I say 'workshop'...it's more of a playground.

His real workshop – the place he does actual work – turns out to be a cave in Afghanistan where he's held captive with his freedom promised in exchange for building one of his new missiles. The one rather insensitively named the Jericho (it's basically a line of clusterbombs).

It isn't exactly surprising that Stark realises he's part of an industry with no moral standpoint, that exploits the world and causes untold damage and death. While it may be ironic that his injuries are caused by one of his own weapons, it should be no surprise that the Afghan insurgents that use them – and capture him – own such devices. What is surprising is that it takes Stark so very long to realise that an arms manufacturing company will happily sell weapons to both sides in a conflict; they are probably the only businessmen not to agree that national boundaries are bad for business. Normally, arms dealers don't consider the issues Stark raises at his first press conference as a free man. Things like the impact their work has on civilians and perpetuating conflict. They avoid these because otherwise they'll get caught up in questioning their morals and won't function any more. Arms manufacturers have to be amoral and unscrupulous – Stark begins to challenge that and that's where the film really gets going.

Though it's disappointing, in a way, because up until then Stark had been refusing to conform to a stereotype; he wasn't brashly militaristic, nor delighting in local wars. He recognised soldiers and warfare as necessary evils in a world that isn't perfect, while quoting his dad's saying that peace means having a bigger stick than the other guy. A pragmatic world-view.

But Stark is actually staggeringly naïve, somehow not realising that his company is just as happy to sell to militia and extremists as they are to the US military. It's an opportunism and a business attitude personified in his partner, Obadiah Stane (Jeff Bridges) – who is the true study of the pragmatic underbelly of American business (not to mention shady business and military deals globally). Bridges' path to villain status is smooth and subtle, understated with just the right amount of friendliness.

But the film's focus is always Downey and that suit, regardless of qualms about his ideas being used to develop weaponry (which is what his ideas have always been about – why does it only now strike him as wrong? because he's seen that non-Americans ('bad' people) use them too?).

The suit – changed from gold (a bit 'ostentatious') to hot-rod red – is one big boy's toy to go alongside the sportscars and super intelligent computers Stark already has, to say nothing of the hi-tech computer and Malibu villa-cum-housing-complex. In fact, he only builds the thing when he's frozen out of the Board of Directors at Stark Industries and his responsibilities are relaxed. Mid-life crisis of the superhero? Even his boyish grin when admitting his identity to a room full of reporters smacks of a certain roguish immaturity.

But that's Downey's charm; he's playing a naïve, irresponsible arms dealer, yet still makes him innately likeable. Many scenes are played with rapid, almost over-lapping dialogue that feel like there was never a script, instead we're listening to actual conversation. It's just something about Downey's laid-back intensity (yep, I know) that draws the viewer in and makes it all seem fairly plausible. Although making the first suit from inside a cave still seems pretty unlikely.

While not descending to the depths of, say, Transformers 2, Iron Man is still a bit of an excuse for big metal men to blow things up and punch holes in things. Not necessarily a bad thing, but almost certainly one for the boy's toys market.

The Soloist

Man is a social creature. No matter what the company he keeps, he invariably wants to exist in company.

He – or she, for that matter – also tends to think of himself before others, which is called greed and has led over the centuries to massive differences between the most impoverished and the most wealthy of humanity. There's a line in ITV's recent Wuthering Heights where Heathcliff says he made his fortune by taking advantage of other men's weaknesses – and it's a sentiment that rings very true for all fortunes made on the back of some exploited person.

Exploitation is a big theme hanging over true-story The Soloist. It's the latest film about a gifted person in poverty (and with mental health issues on this occasion), who meets someone that sees his talent and wants to help him. That would be sweet, if it weren't for the fact that the person helping him is reporter for the LA Times – Steve Lopez (Robert Downey Jr.) – who features this homeless, schizophrenic prodigy of a musician in his newspaper column and picks up a journalism award for it. As he picks up his award, his ex-wife jokes that he's exploiting this man – Nathaniel Ayers (Jamie Foxx) – and tells him he should write a book as well as the column. She neglects to mention the film that would be adapted from that book.

Meanwhile, Ayers is slumming it with the 90,000 homeless people of Los Angeles. He's been homeless since running away from the college course that allowed him to play cello in an orchestra, which went downhill once he started hearing voices. Now he's down-sized and plays his two-stringed violin in the streets. He's the soloist of the title, but this story belongs to Lopez. He's the reporter that starts off telling his readers about Ayers, but then gets more involved until he's writing about the ways that he's changing Ayers' life – whether Ayers likes it or not.

While such philanthropy is admirable, it seems misplaced, or perhaps misjudged. Lopez directs his efforts at one man, who only appreciates it some of the time. He's a man uncomfortable indoors, a man who is happiest listening to the sounds of Beethoven's string compositions swelling through the city air and mingling with the sounds of the freeway traffic and building work. Lopez's intrusive 'help' sees him moved to an apartment, and away from the sounds of people that had surrounded him. While it seems an improvement on the crowded slum (crowded mostly with black and mentally handicapped people, the oft-ignored side of America), Ayers has chosen that slum over the apartment he used to have.

It seems the American Dream in which everyone is free to do as s/he pleases has gone sour, as Lopez imposes his help on Ayers while using his story to win awards (and presumably Brownie points at the local philanthropists' club), and a cello teacher tries to convert the prodigy to God.