Our Film editor Marjorie Baumgarten brought up on the boards the question of villainry, arguing that the villains are the more interesting characters. History might be on her side – Alfred Molina’s tortured Doc Ock, Gene Hackman’s crazy-eyed Lex Luthor, Al Pacino’s hunchbacked Big Boy Caprice – all of ’em vastly more entertaining than the earnest, sometimes-yawning caped crusaders.
Interesting, then, that two of this summer’s superhero movies (well, three, if you count Hancock) had villains who were mostly negligible. In both the Hulk reboot and Iron Man, the big baddies (Tim Roth, Jeff Bridges) basically co-opted our heroes’ technology and made themselves bigger, badder versions of the original, which led to curiously flat climaxes – basically loud, clanging choruses of “Anything you can do I can do better.”
That said, Iron Man was a blast – and I do hope you see it today so we can talk some more about it. I think some of your c.b. movie reservations have to do with your perceived adolescent-ness of the superhero, but Iron Man/Tony Stark is fully adult – sexy, sarcastic, existentially conflicted. The film hinges on Stark’s moral crisis about his role in arming the planet – intelligently and soberly reflecting on America’s identity crisis in an (almost!) post-Bush era (although the waterboarding of an American by an Arab was in questionable taste).
Actually, Hulk – which I thought was the far, far inferior movie – also pivoted on the American military-industrial complex’s damaging effects… so maybe the real villain in these pieces isn’t the genetically-engineered monster or the egomaniacal CFO but rather our own war-mongering ways?
Uh oh. Did I just open the door for you to rail about American imperialism?
This article appears in July 4 • 2008.
