IRON MAN 3

(Shane Black, 2013)

It is startling just how many of the situations and beats familiar from Shane Black's previous work - most celebratedly as a screenwriter on action classics, yes, dammit, classics like Lethal Weapon and The Last Boyscout - are present and correct in Iron Man 3.
There's the Christmas setting, a Black obsession. There's the scene where the hero, captured, bound and seemingly hopelessly doomed, calmly tells the evil goons holding him that they're dead, then proceeds somehow to make good on his word. There is also a scene of a mismatched pair of action heroes - in this case Robert Downey Jr as Tony Stark and Don Cheadle as James Rhodes, better known as War Machine, or in this film; the Iron Patriot - bickering amusingly in the middle of much action mayhem.
But more than that, Iron Man 3 has that Shane Black feeling to it, an ability to seem quick-witted and sharp-tongued while dealing in material that seems slightly heavier than anything in the first two Iron Man films, a creative approach to the chaotic destruction demanded by the genre which works because the emotions and audience experience of those kinds of scenes is so well-understood by the storyteller, and the sense that the storyteller in question is just as interested in comedy as action, and indeed, prefers to see the two working in harmony.
Black has always been excellent at the sort of satisfying action beats that a truly great genre film needs, and curiously, that may be where Iron Man 3 is weakest. Super-hero films - Nolan's Batman trilogy apart - inescapably boil down to a scene where cgi characters fight, and what matters then is how well the film sets up that sequence, and how capably it delivers it. The Avengers, for instance, is ok in the set-up, but just about overwhelms the audience with the scale of the climactic action scene, whereas the first two Iron Man films, both directed with vaguely anonymous efficiency by Jon Favreau, returning here in a small part, are good in the set-up but fudged in the climax. Black gets a lot right here - his dialogue (the script is co-written with Drew Pearce, creator of the brilliant and underseen UK superhero sitcom No Heroics) is consistently funny and clever, his villains (Guy Pearce at his smarmiest and Ben Kingsley, surprisingly funny as the kind of Mandarin created to bait fans of the source material) are relatively interesting and their connection to Stark gives the film a nice charge, and the film is full of great, quirky little details that make it feel less of a corporate product than its predecessors.
And the challenge of the superhero genre seems to have brought the best out of him in some ways; he finds inventive ways to make Stark the underdog, and the scenes where he has to fight superpowered thugs with little more than some semi-functioning technology and his considerable wits are the best and most involving action scenes in the movie.
The story finds Stark after the cosmic events of The Avengers having panic attacks while a terrorist named the Mandarin bombs seemingly random targets and a corporate Scientist rival (Pearce's Aldritch Killian) is tinkering with technology provided by an old one-night stand of Starks (Rebecca Hall). Her work seems to allow the body to heal itself, providing Killian with an army of unbeatable soldiers.
It ends up with Stark out of action and hiding out in small-town Tennessee where he teams up with a young boy to repair his malfunctioning armour and get to the bottom of teh mystery of the Mandarin.
Odd scenes stand out for their quality; the bits with Stark and the boy, which should be awful, are instead funny and charming, and an action scene after the bombing of Air Force One is absolutely terrific. Downey Jr owns the role of Stark to the extent that his portrayal almost seems more definitive than the character in the comics - and has massively influenced that character - and Black writes well to his old collaborator's strengths; he knows how to emphasise Downey's wit yet still make him likeable.
As a director, he's similar to Favreau - not much visual identity is evident in his work, but he doesn't get much wrong. And yet, it all comes down to the usual smash-fest in a dockyard, like so many action films, and though it is never boring, I couldn't help but wish I was seeing a bit more of Shane Black and a bit less of Marvel.
Even under corporate and genre constraints he does consistently entertaining work, but off the leash he is capable of so much more. Maybe next time...

BROOKLYNS FINEST

(Antoine Fuqua, 2010) There are three intertwined story threads in Brooklyn's Finest, each of them seemingly attempting to pack in more cliches than the others. Each focuses on a different cop. There is the ageing beat cop Duggan (Richard Gere), burnt out and cynical and with no life beyond the job, with only seven days to retirement. Then there's the Vice Detective Sal (Ethan Hawke), bowed beneath the financial responsibility of raising a family to the extent that he begins to steal money from drug busts. And finally there's Tango (Don Cheadle), so deep undercover with a drug gang that his old life has disintegrated and he has begun to doubt which side he's on. These three characters are set on a collision course, of course, but not before the plot has forced them through some tortuous scenes familiar from a dozen cop movies and tv shows. There are plenty of double-crosses, macho standoffs, shootouts in drug nests, nagging wives and hollow cops staring out of windows, alongside all the gangsta posturing and reactionary New York Cop braggadocio. Duggan's only friend is a prostitute he frequents and has fallen in love with. Sal is increasingly frenzied and unpredictable in his desperation. Tango has to get off of undercover before it destroys him, but his loyalty to a gang lord who has saved his life (Wesley Snipes) is a conflict for him. All of this familiar genre storytelling can only end one way - in gunplay. This is a story only violence and death can resolve, and sure enough there are bullets and some major characters don't make it. It seems to take the position that being a cop in a city with as much moral compromise as New York - or at least Brooklyn - is an impossible job, and one that destroys any who attempt to do it, but its approach is a tad too pulpy and a little too generic to say anything interesting about the issues it raises. Instead it settles for obliterating them with gunfire. What makes it watchable - to the reasonable extent that it is - are the performances. The dialogue in the script is serviceable, with a few compelling speeches, but the three leads each give it a dose of intensity and charisma that jolts it along. Hawke has the showiest part, all sweaty angst, and Cheadle is a powerful presence, but Gere is perhaps the standout, exuding a moral weariness and armouring himself with a jaded detachment which is only given more potency by the movie star aura he still possesses. He is slightly mannered , but his storyline is the least well-assimilated here, but that may help it and him. The supporting cast is classy, filled with alumni from The Wire alongside the likes of great character players like Ellen Barkin, Will Patton, Vincent D'Onofrio and Lili Taylor - none of them given much to do - but Fuqua makes it all look a bit too slick, all shining surfaces and pretty lights. He has directed enough action films to know how to make an action scene pop, but the kind of grit and complexity the world the portrays here demands is absent in his direction of this story, and that's a shame.

THE GUARD

(John Michael McDonagh, 2011)

In the years immediately following the release of Pulp Fiction, Quentin Tarantino's influence on cinema was massive. Mainstream action blockbusters got sidetracked by scenes where characters discussed pop culture minutae. Every single low-budget crime film tried to play with pulp conventions by utilising quirky takes on archetypes or infusing stockly generic situations with a sort of realism. It didn't last long, however. Tarantino is hard to get right - he himself has struggled in a couple of works since - and a film can look thoroughly pawltry if it tries and fails to ape his work.
But in another way, Tarantino has been internalized by pop culture. When a film combines crime thriller plot elements with blackly comic dialogue, seemingly random cultural references and some homages to classic or cultish cinema, the audience has a point of reference. Nobody is confused by this mixture. In theatre, Martin McDonagh has made such a mix his own in a series of savage, hilarious plays mainly set in the West of Ireland. He softened that sensibility for his first feature, In Bruges. Now his brother, John Michael McDonagh makes his debut as writer-director, and there is a definite family resemblance.
The Guard is a crime thriller with more laughs than thrills, and adds to its quietly Tarantino-esque pleasures an inimitably Irish viewpoint which gives it a refreshing, soulful quality also present in In Bruges. It shares a star with that film, and Brendan Gleeson is terrific here; suggesting the depth and ambiguity of his Galway Police Sergeant inside his first scene but always funny, charismatic and entertaining to watch. He also has abundant chemistry with Don Cheadle as the fish-out-water FBI Officer stunned by his attitude.
The Guard, Cheadle aside, is incredibly Irish, as if McDonagh set out to reflect the moods and variety of the country and its people in his film, which is melancholy yet jolly, coal black yet hilarious, violent yet tender, warm yet stoic in the face of strong emotion, rambling, foul-mouthed, literate yet cinematic, bawdy, witty and even a little moving.
It has a sure feel for the landscape and language of the Irish West, bleakly empty and beautiful and filled with slyly, dryly funny eccentrics. McDonagh fills it with big 'scope images of the yawning skies above Connemara and its expanses of green stretching off to the horizon, his figures isolated in corners of the large frame. The obvious Leone reference is underlined by the Morricone pastiche of the soundtrack, which in turn points up the big Western-style moral choice of the climax, when Gleeson's Boyle has a "man's gotta do" moment.
Perhaps surprisingly, the Western echoes fit snugly alongside McDonaghs terrific dialogue, which allows Drug smugglers to quote Nietzsche, reference Bertrand Russell and ponder the lyrics of "Ode to Billy Joe", while Boyle himself discusses Gogol and listens to Chet Baker.
The supporting cast is excellent, with such reliable actors as Liam Cunningham and Mark Strong offering casually great work and plainly loving McDonagh's writing.
In the end, the funny stuff stops and there is gunplay, death and reckoning. Yet somehow, McDonagh makes that work too. His first film is a rousingly satisfying experience and suggests that he may have a fine, fascinating career awaiting him.