Here was a callow teenage superhero with the same doubts and foibles as the audiences reading the comic, desperately trying to balance his duties to the people of Manhattan with his studies, chores and need to earn enough pocket money to take Mary Jane out on a Saturday night.įittingly, the incredibly successful 2002 film version saw director Sam Raimi transforming what had become a tired and directionless genre with a character-led approach that similarly invited viewers to identify and empathise with its wall-crawling, skyscraper-straddling hero. When Stan Lee came up with the idea for Spider-Man in 1962, the wisecracking web-slinger was a revelation. With the viewer (not to mention Iron Man himself) suddenly way outside the comfort zone, we find ourselves hurtling headlong towards the final credits with renewed vigour. Black's movie slips slinkily from the predictability trap as we find ourselves blinking at the screen in disbelief, wondering if we are about to miss another deft sleight of hand. We're contentedly caught up in another movie entirely (the enjoyment of which probably says some pretty shoddy things about our own prejudices) when the twist in the tale manifests, and the effect is instant. Instead, the Kiss Kiss Bang Bang director delivered the series' best instalment so far via a perfectly-pitched twist that comes about as close as the superhero genre will ever get to its very own Crying Game moment.īen Kingsley's nefarious Mandarin is a preposterous, shadowy Bin Laden clone with a big bushy beard and rhetoric drawn from the Acme guide to over-the-top comic book villainy, taunting Robert Downey Jr's Iron Man with lines like: "You'll never see me coming!" The problem is, he's right. Shane Black's jagged-edged debut in the Marvel hotseat might easily have been a by-the-numbers "threequel", especially with star Robert Downey Jr out of contract and The Avengers' stupendous box office success a year earlier.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |