Up in the Sky
PODHORETZ, JOHN
Up in the Sky It’s a bird! It’s a plane! It’s an angst-ridden superhero! BY JOHN PODHORETZ Earlier this summer, Iron Man grabbed the glum superheromovie genre by the lapels, shook it a bit,...
...2) When you’re very rich, you can build all sorts of fun toys, including a robot suit that fl ies and shoots things...
...He’s a talky villain, though, full of philosophical ruminations about the nature of evil and crime and duality and vengeance...
...The city’s only honest cop runs a unit penetrated by the mob...
...As for Batman, he doesn’t have much to say, and what he does say is delivered in a raspy basso that makes him sound like Ezio Pinza with strep...
...Batman is in danger of being corrupted by the pleasure he takes in his vigilantism...
...Over the past two decades, ever since director Tim Burton had set his 1989 smash-hit Batman inside a shadowy Art Deco nightscape, and featured the fast-talking comic powerhouse Michael Keaton sporting a selfpitying silent scowl for two hours, movie superheroes have mostly been tormented, gloomy, and neurotic—which is odd, really, considering their remarkable abilities, though perhaps less odd considering that these movies are aimed almost entirely at teenage boys...
...John Podhoretz, editorial director of Commentary, is THE WEEKLY STANDARD’s movie critic...
...Indeed, so corrupt is Gotham City that the only perfectly honest person there is its villain, the Joker...
...Its makers seem to forget that it’s a movie about a man who goes out at night wearing a black rubber hat...
...Audiences went wild for Iron Man precisely because the movie dispensed with angst and made the following points: (1) It’s fun to be very rich...
...A noble district attorney must face the temptations of greed...
...The Dark Knight carries within it the distinct sense that levity of any sort is a mark of unwelcome frivolity...
...No man should have this kind of power,” intones Morgan Freeman, but since the “power” in question makes everything look like a bad architectural sketch, it’s hard to understand why he would resign in protest from Bruce Wayne Industries over it...
...He is a purely negative force, and as embodied by the magnifi cent young Australian actor Heath Ledger, he is one of the most terrifying villains the screen has ever seen...
...Iron Man came out in May...
...When he gets into a debate about the nature of corruption—and he does, several times, with the DA and the Joker, not to mention Michael Caine and Morgan Freeman, who are along for the ride—you really hope his interlocutor will stop for a second and offer him a lozenge...
...It runs two-and-a-half hours and, as its length suggests, my, my, my is it serious—the way a teenager’s earnest essay about the threat of global warming is serious...
...He takes it upon himself to test everyone’s patience, sanity, and willingness to act for the common good...
...There are other problems with The Dark Knight— particularly one involving a device that turns all cell phones into some kind of sonar system...
...3) When you’re very rich and you have a robot suit, you can use it to fl y halfway around the world and kill terrorists...
...The good guys are not always available to deal with the Joker because they are in another part of Gotham City, listening to the incorruptible new district attorney (Aaron Eckhart) delivering yet another in an endless series of lectures about heroes and the need for them and the quest to defeat evil...
...It is full of nerve-jangling life when he is on screen, and it’s hollow when he’s off...
...The Dark Knight is the second movie in the new series that was inaugurated a few years ago with Batman Begins...
...Now, only two months later, the neurotic gloom is back with a vengeance...
...The career crisis of Freeman’s character is of a piece with the didactic tone taken by The Dark Knight...
...On and on he goes, while everyone just stands around and listens to him blather...
...Ledger, who killed himself a few months after shooting was completed, is so powerful a presence that he throws the movie entirely off-kilter...
...This was taken to its limit in 2003 when Hulk became an insanely Freudian tale about a father who briefl y turns his infant son into a monster, then returns 20 years later to turn him into a monster again, and is fi nally killed by his own son the monster...
...It is a study of Corruption with a capital C—the corruption of the spirit, the corruption of the soul, corruption in business, police corruption, and human corruption...
...BY JOHN PODHORETZ Earlier this summer, Iron Man grabbed the glum superheromovie genre by the lapels, shook it a bit, and shouted, “Lighten up...
...Even when a superhero movie goes for a light touch, as the fi rst two Spiderman ones did, it comes at the expense of the protagonist, who is not allowed to enjoy his talents or take advantage of them but must suffer comic humiliations because of those gifts...
Vol. 13 • July 2008 • No. 43
