Oh well. At least it wasn’t awful.

Two words spring imme­di­ately to mind: for­mu­laic and shal­low. Not that there’s any­thing wrong with being for­mu­laic and shal­low — indeed many for­mu­laic and shal­low pic­tures nonethe­less rake in the big bucks — but for­mu­las become pre­dictable, and pre­dictabil­ity kills immer­sion unless the char­ac­ters are inter­est­ing enough. Here, they weren’t. They just weren’t devel­oped enough to make me care.

Bat­man Begins fol­lows much the same for­mula, but in that film, we had real char­ac­ter depth and con­flict. We dig into Bruce Wayne’s moti­va­tions. We don’t do that with Tony Stark, so we don’t care about him. The film becomes a vehi­cle for impres­sive but vapid spe­cial effects and an intol­er­a­ble string of ham-​​handed set pieces (accom­pa­nied by obnox­ious, repet­i­tive, heavy metal riffs) show­ing them off.

You slav­ishly fol­low a for­mula so you don’t have to think about plot. Use a plot with an estab­lished suc­cess rate, dress it up in the lat­est SFX bling, and rake in the dough. It really isn’t art.

It had some good moments. Even some of the set pieces (most of which made it into the trailer, which, hav­ing seen the film, I can now say was an absolute mas­ter­piece of edit­ing and mar­ket­ing) were nice, even if over­done. It man­aged to keep my atten­tion, if super­fi­cially, and didn’t stag­nate. My favorite moment has a fake-​​bald Jeff Bridges yelling at Unnamed Also-​​Fake-​​Bald Sci­en­tist that Tony Stark was able to built some cool techy thing in a cave with spare bits, and the sci­en­tist respond­ing “But I’m not Tony Stark!”

I hated the score because it was over­wrought, intru­sive, and added noth­ing to the expe­ri­ence. And Gwyneth Pal­trow got roy­ally screwed by the main unit focus puller dur­ing the bal­cony, almost-​​kiss scene. And there were more con­ti­nu­ity issues (e.g., Gwyneth’s shoes mys­te­ri­ously change while she’s sneak­ing into Stark’s office at the end of Act IV) than there ought to have been in a film of this bud­get. They skimped on prin­ci­pal pho­tog­ra­phy almost as much as they skimped on the plot. Just goes to show that hav­ing a big post bud­get for effects can’t make up for shoddy source material.