What did Santa Bring You? MOVIES!

Of course, it’s the holiday that almost every American looks forward to. The day of gift giving and receiving, the attendant stress of all that entails, the meals with family, and the eventual flick. This can flip, of course. The attendant stress of shopping for people you don’t like, the meals with people who are bound to say something to set you off (particularly, after a shot of something festive…Goldschlager, for instance…or heroin), and this year, this is all combined with COVID-19. This latter may come as a boon to many; the smart people who didn’t travel to endure the tortures of the damned (and who want to live without a possibly fatal pathogen.)

In either case, there is the wonder of film to kill a few hours.

I don’t really think too much about what I’m going to watch on any given holiday, but you can be sure that I’ll watch “The Thin Man” on or around New Year’s Eve or New Year’s Day. Sadly, I don’t drink anymore, so I can’t match Nick and Norah martini for martini…oh, good times….

Christmas used to be the obligatory Jesus film; anything from Jeffrey Hunter in “I Was a Teenage Jesus” aka “King of Kings” to Willem Dafoe in “The Last Temptation of Christ” to Shane Black’s “Kiss Kiss Bang Bang” (and let’s not forget McTiernan’s little indie, “Die Hard”, vying for Best Christmas Movie Ever).

One Christmas Day, I remember hunkering down with “The Seventh Seal”…it’s not so thematically unrelated. It’s got a Crusader, right? That’s Christian, right there.

This year, however, I’m treating myself to one of the previously mentioned movies and three that I haven’t seen in altogether too long; including two superhero movies and one of my all-time favorite Holiday slasher films! I still get my Shane Black on and, you better believe: “Die Hard”, bitches!!!!

 

First up: Iron Man 3

Shane Black + Christmas = Gold. Just plain, pure gold. Add Robert Downey, Jr. into the equation and you have platinum. “Kiss Kiss Bang Bang” was Downey’s re-entry into becoming a bankable actor after addiction and incarceration derailed his career, to say, nothing of his life. The RDJ that arrived in the third Iron Man feature (and the fifth appearance of Downey in the Marvel Cinematic Universe) was a reformed man. In this reconnection with Black, none of the magic from the earlier film goes missing and much is added to it.

There are worlds of difference between Downey’s con-man/thief/idiot with a heart of gold (there’s that word again) in the previous movie and the billionaire former-arms-dealer-cum-warrior-for-peace we see here. What Downey does in his role as Tony Stark is pretty remarkable. I had forgotten how arrogant and privileged he was in the earlier films and it’s here that nuance and vulnerability are more pronounced.

We meet a Stark who is suffering from the PTSD of warding off an alien invasion that ruined New York. He’s shaken to his core and it is affecting his relationship with the love of his life Pepper Potts (again, say what you will – or what I will – about Gwynyth Paltrow’s GOOP, but she is a hell of an actress) and Happy Hogan (Jon Favreau, stepping away from directing chores on this third outing). He’s compulsively retooling the suit, and having flashbacks and disturbing dreams. And ----oh. Did I say “flashbacks”? Why, yes, yes I did.

This is a Shane Black film that begins back in 1999, New Year’s Eve. Downey’s narration sets the scene as he tells us (and SPOILER: Stark is actually talking to someone else to be revealed in the post-credits sequence…if you haven’t seen the flick and are going to, stop now, go to Disney+ or find a DVD and watch it; I write about movies in their entirety here) about “how it all began”. No, not his origin story, just the events that led up to the current film’s plot.

It wouldn’t be a Shane Black film without: Christmas, narration, and flashbacks, would it?

So, at the turn of the century, Stark and Happy meet a young woman with a promising biological project. She has developed a bio/tech regenerative process that requires funding and additional R&D. Rebecca Hall’s Maya Hansen is full of promise and has impressed Stark enough to get some facetime with him and, uh, more. They start out in a crowded elevator with an uber-nerdy Guy Pearce as Aldrich Killian, founder and CEO of Advanced Idea Mechanics (A.I.M.), who wants nothing more than to meet with Hansen and/or Stark and Tony quickly dons the prick garb to shoot him down. As everyone exits the elevator, Stark tells Killian to go to the roof, Stark says he is interested in working with Killian and will meet him there.

Obviously, Stark doesn’t go, and we see Hansen’s regenerative plant glow and rebuild. While they’re in the bedroom, the plant explodes – a glitch Hansen is working out. Happy, by the way, tackles Tony in a belated move to protect his boss, and well, eh.

We move back to the present where an unhinged eco-terrorist is committing atrocities/murder and such like to bring the U.S. to brook. He’s called the Mandarin and to Marvel’s credit, they did not make him Chinese, but left him as a sort of multi-ethnic man of a mysterious past type. Ben Kingsley strikes the right sang froid notes and Tony wants in on bringing him to justice. Suffice it to say that, after the events in New York, the U.S. military is deciding to handle this themselves. They don’t deem the Mandarin as superhero beat-down worthy.

In the meantime, Aldrich Killian has made a second foray to get Stark’s attention and buy-in, having teamed up with Maya to perfect her regenerative biotech, now called Extremis. Killian meets with Stark Industries new CEO, Pepper Potts who tells him that while the tech sounds wonderful, it could be weaponized and this is not something that Stark or Stark Industries would want to pursue. She wishes him luck and he takes his leave.

During this time, Happy has been promoted to Chief of Security, has generated 300 complaints about his management in that role (and takes that as a plus), and is disturbed by both Killian and his bodyguard/security detail Savin (an appropriately malevolent James Badge Dale). Happy tries to get Tony to come by and check Killian out and adds that Killian is showing an undue amount of interest in Pepper, and so on. Hap places Killian as the guy they met 13 years ago and that a lot of this stinks.

Happy continues to shadow Savin and his plus-one to the TCL Theater where Happy engages with the first bodyguard and nicks a vial from him. He swiftly discovers that there’s something odd about the man when the guy isn’t fazed by Happy’s blows and glows red. Hot – very hot – and red. The guy tosses Happy across the theater and the fellow’s associate is now glowing redder and hotter (he can’t “regulate”, meaning he can’t control Extremis) and explodes. Who knew that spontaneous human combustion could result in a detonation of 3,000 degrees Celsius? Everything within the immediate blast radius is vaporized and Happy is just far out of the radius to receive extensive burns and sustain what looks like full-body trauma.

The Mandarin claims responsibility for this action and of course, the press want to know what Stark is going to do, particularly since his friend was a victim. A pushy tabloid reporter tells Tony that someone should kill the Mandarin and Tony looks him in the eye and asks him, “is that what you want?” Apparently, it’s what Tony wants, too, as he threatens the Mandarin on live feed and gives out his home address if the Mandarin wants to throw down. This is a bad idea.

But without the bad idea, we’d be left with a mere procedural instead of a whackingly cool Shane Black movie.

Once back at home, where Pepper has doing her utmost to get Tony to set aside his tinkering and try to get some kind of balance, the compound is surrounded by reporters, vans, and helicopters. There’s a knock at the door, and (re)enter Maya Hansen, come to warn Tony about her employer Killian who may be working for the Mandarin. She doesn’t get that far.

Pepper and Tony start a bickering over leaving home and getting away from the circus show when Maya asks if they should be concerned about what they’re seeing on the TV monitor: a rocket apparently on its way to a direct hit on the building in which they’re standing. The next few moments of destruction are far more fraught than these kinds of things usually are. Tony summons the Mach 42 armor to protect Pepper from the blast, tells her to get Maya out and that he’ll be fine. He’s going to handle this. Except that no, that’s not likely to happen under a heavier barrage that seems to presage Thanos’s attack on Avengers HQ in Endgame.

Once they’re outside, the armor loosens itself from Pepper and turns to Tony who by this point is very much going down with the ship. House. Jarvis – the redoubtable Paul Bettany – informs Stark that the suit is not combat ready. Tony’s able to get a few shots in and take down a couple of aircraft, but by then, it’s too late; the whole cliff face, house, and Stark all collapse into the ocean and by the time he’s able to extricate himself from nearly drowning in the suit (saved, thanks in no small part, to Jarvis), the Mandarin’s attack unit has moved on and the new Iron Man suit has begun its trajectory on its flight path to Tennessee. Tony had found clues to a possible suspect in an earlier incident that had similar heat signatures to what had just been seen at the theater’s explosion.

In the meantime, Pepper and Maya have fled and Maya explains to Pepper that she’s worried that her boss Killian is working for the Mandarin. Having fled to what looks to be quite the hotel, Killian shows up and it grows obvious that Hansen is still working for him and if she is worried about Hansen’s relationship to the Mandarin, that may take a second place to their longer game of refining Extremis and perhaps hers of eventually ditching Killian and going indy (perhaps using Extremis for good?)

At any rate, with Pepper now a kidnap victim, Tony wakes to find himself in Tennessee in a power-depleted suit and a Jarvis who, like Tony, is in desperate need of sleep (it had been established earlier that Tony had been up for 72 hours and it was starting to show). The movie kicks into greater Shane Black mode at this point with the introduction of Ty Simpkins as Harley Keener. Harley is a fourteen year old put-upon kid whose acumen we come to see early on. Tony has lugged his armor into someone’s garage and that someone turns out to be Harley’s family’s.

Shane Black’s penchant of buddy films is part of his bread and butter. “Lethal Weapon”, “The Last Boy Scout”, “The Last Action Hero”, “Kiss Kiss Bang Bang”, “The Nice Guys” most recently, and of course, the current work under consideration all traffic in the relationships that develop between two characters meeting a crisis as a team. Simkins’ Harley is a study in tight, restrained acting for an age when overexuberance and mugging is often used instead. In many ways, Harley and Stark’s relationship seems like a dry run for Stark and Peter Parker’s a few years later.

Stark is without resources, seemingly, but he has a capable assistant and support in the young Keener. As Tony sets about determining what tools he needs, he also realizes he needs to try to find someone who knows something about the blast that left that heat signature years before. Harley takes him to the blast site which is now festooned with flowers left by friends and relatives. The walls bear five shadows of victims of the blast and when Tony wonders about that, Harley tells him that the five people that died all went to heaven but that Chad Davis, the man who was painted as responsible, went to hell.

There was a cover-up, of course. This was an Extremis experiment that went wrong and was papered over by claims that Davis who went mental and killed himself and others. In short order, Harley leads Stark to a bar where he meets a woman, Davis’s widow, and consoles her, telling her that Davis had done nothing wrong, that he’d been used. The woman has a file on Davis and lets on that she mistook Tony for someone else who was coming to talk to her. That someone was part of A.I.M.; Homeland Security agent (allegedly) Brandt (all too brief a performance by Stephanie Szostak), and of course, Savin.

Tony kills Brandt and is able to subdue Savin. He and Harley book it out of the scene in Savin’s car. Stark has another panic attack and realizes that he’s got very little on hand to work with. Harley asks him simply, “you're the mechanic, right?” “That's what I said.” “Then build something.” The kid’s good, I tell ya.

Along the way, while all this is going on, Stark has been in touch with Col. Rhodes (the great - as though that needs to be said, Don Cheadle...geez, he's good...), who as War Machine has been sent on a wild goose chase to find and terminate the Mandarin, particularly after the Mandarin hacked the President of the United States’ phone and threatened to kill him by Christmas morning. Rhodey is in Pakistan finding no Mandarin or troops and winds up releasing women in a sweat shop. He’s told Stark his password to help Tony access the Defense Department’s files on the Mandarin.  

I want to pause for a minute here. What goes unsaid here is the crackling dialog and the relationship between Stark and Harley. The beauty of this particular MCU film is that it’s self-contained and the focus in on Tony Stark, the man and his dawning understanding that he’s not the only bright bulb in the firmament; there are people at every turn helping him and one of them just happens to be a really funny and smart boy.

Black’s dialog maintains the perfect rhythm for Downey and Simpkins. Harley doesn’t fall for Stark’s “kid” bullshit but he seems to have the maturity to appreciate where Tony is coming from. He doesn’t freak out as a fanboy when he meets Tony and sees the Iron Man armor in the garage. He keeps cool throughout very harrowing proceedings, but most of all, he’s present when Tony has his panic attacks and talks him through them.

The Potts and Stark relationship is one of the MCU’s treasures and even though we never see Harley again (until Stark’s funeral), one has to wonder if Stark didn’t continue to stay in touch with Harley. Did Stark mentor him, not to the hands-on degree as with Peter Parker, but owing to the final scene we see of Harley at the movie’s end, one wonders.

Stark is, of course, the linchpin in the MCU and everyone has distinct, well-defined relationships with him but this one was special. It’s the first time we see Stark on his own, meeting someone who has a greater emotional depth as a person (and he’s just a kid!) and doesn’t judge him.

In fact, what makes this film really spin is that it is Downey’s film. I’ve said this a lot: I could do without the action, the fights, and the epic set pieces and would be perfectly happy to see these characters relate. It helps that the talent involved are some of the finest actors in film, but it’s rare that the MCU has let an actor breathe enough to really fill out the film. (Having said that, sure, many are focused on one figure, but all too often, it’s formulaic: banter that determines the figures character/bad guy shows up/fight-fight/more banter/fight-fight/end.)

There is plenty of action here and it is a gorgeous looking film (all hail John Toll: didn’t care for “Braveheart” or “Legends of the Fall”, but the man knows how to frame a shot – just ask “Avengers: Age of Ultron”, “Crazy Rich Asians” or hell, “Thor: the Dark World”), but it stands or falls with Downey. Boy, does it stand.

After Harley has told Tony to build something, Stark makes his way to Miami where he’s located the source signal for the Mandarin’s streams. In one of the best reveals in cinema (again: SPOILERS FOR A SEVEN YEAR OLD FILM), Ben Kingsley is no more the Mandarin than, well, I am. As Trevor Slattery, the drug-addled thespian who plays the Mandarin, Kingsley is all comic timing and funny as shit. Of course, he’s too good an actor to go overboard, so you detect just how dim Trevor’s bulb is; the burn-out is palpable. Hey, it’s good writing, folks.

Killian crew arrive on the scene, capture Stark and after Tony and Hansen have one more scene, there’s a bit of action at the end of which Hansen grabs an Extremis injector and points it at herself. She takes the high road and tells Killian that she’s out, and without her, who’s going to continue the research?

So he shoots her. He leaves Stark bound and Tony is able to summon the now almost-fully charged suit from Tennessee and escapes. He reunites with Rhodey and they realize that they have to save the kidnapped President and Pepper. And so on and so forth.

At this point, it’s enough to know that justice is served and that Pepper, who had been injected with Extremis, saves Tony at the movie’s end. Again, though, what makes it work is the dialog and two pros with easy chemistry. My understanding is that early on, Favreau and Downey wanted the Stark/Potts relationship to mirror those of the thirties’ screwball comedies. But Downey and Paltrow bring another dimension to the relationship. It feels lived in. They bicker, they fight, and it’s a miracle she hasn’t dislocated his jaw; but such is love?

Happy comes out of his coma to “Downton Abbey” and Harley comes home to his garage one day to see it replete with robotics and more cool stuff than Santa could ever possibly stuff in his sleigh. All with a lovely note from the “The mechanic”.

Voiceover narration returns at the end of credits scene with Tony thanking his listener who turns out to be Mark Ruffalo just waking up from missing the story we just watched. Poor Banner. He’s not that kind of doctor.

There a lot of tropes and conceits regarding superhero films in general that can be trawled over and over again. Oftentimes, it feels like the most they shoot for is a maintaining of the status quo: Iron Man is a billionaire industrialist and genius though he be, he still represents the manifest destiny/capitalist wet dream of a heart of …sigh, these metals, gold (again) who is, naturally, the symbol of all that is good about the System.

However, to Marvel’s credit, even though there is very much a “house style”, within that style, there is some room to breathe. Out of the twenty-something films, none are bad, most are very good and I’m willing to say that four or five are near-masterpieces of pop cinema. To be sure, the Tony Stark character is a kind of subversion of the billionaire capitalist. But not by much. I wouldn’t be shocked to find out that one day down the line, a descendant of Elon Musk developed a suit of nanotech that can fly, resist heavy impact and emit blast rays from the palms. Would that descendant leverage the creation and contract it out? Sure, probably. But what if he’d seen the MCU movies and learned his lesson like Stark?

More eggnog, please! Barkeep I’m in a festive mood!