Iron Man: Rockin' Good Time

Iron Man kicks some serious booty. Big surprise, right? Billed as the newest in a string of seriously awesome comic book flicks, this action packed, visually stunning ride delivers everything it promises and more, beating Spider-Man II out to tie with Batman Begins as the best super hero movie ever.

There's only one thing I'd have changed: The end. (Spoiler Alert)

I'd have had the ice thing work. After flying up into the ionosphere, or whatever, with Obadiah and thumping him on his headpiece, I'd have called it a day. If they needed to blow up a building to make it an action flick, they should have done it before hand. If they needed to give the chick something heroic to do, same deal. Do that first. The ice thing was the big finisher and it should have topped there.

Why, you ask? Simple. It just fit the character better.

Now, I'll admit, I don't know Tony Stark from Adam, or at least I didn't before I saw this. I never read any Iron Man books and I never saw any of the animated movies that came before this one (though I'm seriously considering going and picking up a few of both of those now), but from what I can tell, Tony Stark is Marvel's answer to Bruce Wayne. He's rich, brilliant, flawed, and above all, human. Definitely of the Batman school of super heroes, rather than the Superman school, right?

So why not let that be what gets the job done? Sure, have the slug fest and the explosions and the skin of your teeth suspense stuff at the end. I'm all for it. But what saves the day should be what makes Tony Stark who he is: His intellect. And they almost did it. They set up this whole thing with the ice early in the movie so that it would pay off at the end and Stark sets up this complicated scheme to get Stane to follow him up there specifically because he knows what's going to happen and Stane doesn't, right? The suit was his idea. He built the first one. He improved on it. He almost killed himself testing it and he fixed the little flaws that cropped up. Stane's weakness (even in the more advanced suit) was that he hadn't done that stuff. He had the brawn, but not the brains. Why not make that count for something?

Instead, we get to that crucial point and we see Stark exhausting all his power stores trying to pull of this elaborate trick and what does he get? Nothing. Was Stane's suit even damaged in the fall? How did he survive that? Did he figure out how to reboot his suit just like Stark did? And if so, doesn't that make him just as gifted as Stark? Shouldn't the hero have at least one advantage over the villain?

It just seems like they threw all of that away for the tired cliche of having the monster pop up one more time just when you thought he was dead. Come on, guys. We've all seen the Terminator, okay? We've even seen Johnny Mnemonic and other stuff (like the Buffy episode with Dracula) where they made fun of that because it's so overdone. We don't need to go down that road again. And even if we did, even if that's a crucial part of the modern monster movie, again I say, they should have just reversed the order of those two scenes. Do the building blowing up and have Stane come back from the dead after that instead. Then do the ice thing.

Just my two cents.