22 Things I Learned From 'The Book of Eli'

1. It’s okay to kill a hairless cat.

2. Thirty years after the end of the world it’s still worth checking the taps for running water.

3. Jeopardising a mission to save mankind by sidetracking to charge your iPod is not the action we expect of a stoic protagonist.

4. KFC, Motorola and General Motors will survive the apocalypse, their marketing departments remarkably intact.

5. Once you go black, you go Christian.

6. The hero always enters the town in slow motion.

7. The hero always enters the bar in slow motion.

8. Gary Oldman is at his most entertaining when he is channelling the ghost of Jack Lemmon.

9. You don’t need a seatbelt if you’re pretty.

10. There’s always a quirky, fidgety guy who’s good with electrical appliances (preferably to be played by Tom Waits).

11. End-of-the-world settlements will be ruled over by a faux-intellectual despot and populated by a bunch of illiterate thugs (see also The Postman, 28 Days Later).

12. There may not be any water or food in this world but there is plenty of petrol.

13. Having a character whistle Ennio Morricone does not a clever Western pastiche make.

14. Two fight scenes and two exploding cars does not an action film make.

15. Ponderously dull and literal scripting does not an art film make.

16. Casting the woman who voices Meg Griffin in Family Guy as the love interest somewhat undermines whatever credibility your listless production may have initially had.

17. Shooting Denzel Washington in the chest only makes him stronger (see also Man On Fire).

18. It is possible to make an entire film about the bible without understanding one word of it.

19. Malcolm McDowell is making a career out of being the last straw.

20. Endings which sacrifice logic, characterisation and the moral lessons of all that has gone before at the altar of “looking cool” are somewhat frustrating.

21. If you couldn’t get enough of the trash-punk vehicles, windswept desert vistas and imperative-free plotting on offer in Terminator Salvation, this should certainly be for you.

22. For everyone else, you’re better off reading a book.

Through The Motions: A Review of Episode 6 of ‘Luther’

Having disgraced himself in the eyes of his fellow soldiers, and in doing so undone all his previous heroism and also put his family at risk, Ajax announces that he will journey to the beach of Troy for solitude. It is at this point that Sophocles has the soldier speak of the capriciousness of alliances and identity:

‘I have learnt this-

hate an enemy knowing he may be a friend

love a friend knowing he may be an enemy.

Men are tricky things.’

(translation by Robert Cannon)

Not as tricky as endings, perhaps, judging by the final episode of the first (only?) series of Luther, the London-set detective drama broadcast on the BBC this summer. The more-than-two-millennia old play Ajax begins after an act of extreme violence, and presents the dissolution of a hero renowned for his concrete fortitude. Those Ajax relied upon for support – the goddess Athena – are revealed as at best uncaring towards him, while those he considered sworn enemies – the crafty Odysseus – go to great lengths to restore the shamed man’s honour. So too Luther’s own world is flipped upside down, a state of affairs perhaps intriguing but inevitably fumbled.

(Viewers still in need of catching-up using iPlayer be warned, to fully explicate the sweeping ridiculousness of this sixth episode of Luther it will be necessary to describe the plotting in detail up to and including the final minutes.)

For those who have stuck with the increasingly absurd series, the nadir was surely reached when Luther’s former best mate gunned down Luther’s ex-wife in a scene that could not have been more forced had the actors literally re-positioned themselves according to explicit floor-sketched markers. Perhaps this was intentional – an indication of the hand of fate, the inescapability of tragic circumstance. This is no weak spirit for a drama to mix with: the superlative American cop-show The Shield structured the entire final three seasons (of seven) around a claustrophobic vice of incident, connecting events pregnant with consequence stretching back to the pilot episode with offhand moments throughout the show to create a perfect storm of dread and finality.

The key is in that final word, and the satisfaction it brings. Resolutions can be the male and female protagonists at long last getting together. For our pop-nihilist mainstream though, better to have an arrest, a beating, or best still a murder. (The Shield, in its last episode, managed to trump all of these in its own inimitable way, and if you have not seen the show I urge you to seek it out). We all know the Greeks called it catharsis – the exhausting but welcome purgation of emotion. As those who have kept track of the mainstream response to the Robert Pattinson vehicle Remember Me will be aware, it is always appreciated if the conclusion of a drama is just that – a conclusive rendering of themes, storylines and characters that have been previously established, rather than random occurrences. Luther’s creator and writer Neil Cross goes to great lengths to stack the deck in his favour on this front, and the result – four principle characters converging in a bloody and faux-moralistic confrontation on an abandoned train platform – fails to satisfy on almost every level.

What are these levels? Firstly, and most obviously, there is characterisation. DCI Ian Reed began as just another cop in the office, and Luther’s “best mate”, but without warning or reason he becomes in the last episode and a half a desperate murderer. The extent to which he has covered up his crimes and tried to frame his friend is ludicrous; more damagingly, it undermines any involvement as once again realism is ditched in favour of Drama with a capital D. “But it’s just escapist entertainment” you might cry. However, Reed’s killing of Zoe, and subsequent arrangement of the scene (in minutes, it seems) to implicate Luther is the act of a man far more composed and calculating than the harried wobble that actor Steven Mackintosh grants the character. Escapism is fine; a gaping dissonance between the portrayal of a character and their actions is not. Beyond these accusations, the final scene itself commits further sins of capriciousness, as Reed begs Luther to kill him then, when the tables are turned, fights desperately to save himself. Perhaps a sense of the pitiable wretchedness of his personality would have saved such fluctuations, but as it was not on display we shall never know.

Secondly, and perhaps less noticeably awkward, is the staging itself. The logistics boggle the mind: Zoe’s civilian boyfriend Mark North has, unchallenged, stolen personal property from a police station (property itself left over from the previous episode, and in no serious way remarked upon or given dramatic significance) which implicates Reed. The detective then makes a phone call and asks for North, who is on foot, to be ‘tracked’. North’s position then appears on Reed’s sat-nav and a pursuit begins. Quite what technology is being employed here I do not know, but I suspect it is somewhat outside even the wildest dreams of the Met. North leads Reed to what appears to be an abandoned platform at Waterloo station, at which point there is much yelling, and even gunfire. No police arrive and no civilians interrupt, despite the clear indication that this is an easily accessible space.

Finally, and most offensive, is the deployment of Luther’s dead lover. Any respect for her character has already been shredded by the positioning of her murder as an instigator of Luther’s fugitive-status, rather than an event in its own right. In a move as narcissistic as the shows title, Zoe’s death functions solely as a way of changing Luther’s living conditions. Any hope that this will be rectified is swiftly banished when North, Zoe’s boyfriend who believes Luther to be her killer, is convinced otherwise offscreen! Never has a jump cut been applied so callously to cover up so calamitous a gulf in narrative logic. The final scene brings the final insult – Reed tries to incite Luther to violence by claiming to have slept with Zoe, using previously unheard sexual terms like ‘coming’ and ‘orgasm’. Zoe, originally depicted as a character with strength enough to depart from Luther’s sphere of influence, throughout the series begins sleeping with him again, dies because of a plot that in no way involves her, and is ultimately humiliated. (Humiliated twice over in point of fact: these sexual incitements are meaningful only because they attack Luther’s masculinity.)

In up-turning the world of Ajax, Sophocles might be making a statement (about the fallibility of alliance, the generosity of men, answers on a tweet-feed please), but crucially he is providing a basis for his play using reversal and irony, solid rhetorical traits. The play is assembled using dramatic elements that fit into a meaningful and satisfying formal scheme. The villain in Luther becomes another cop, while the murderess from episode one and the jealous new boyfriend of the ex-wife become allies.

These inversions are meaningless, though, when they fail to force Luther to see his world in a new light. In a show that has been unremittingly singular in its focus, it fails to provide a new insight for the character. Episode one began with a Luther who had let a bad person die and is now psychologically tortured for it. After six hours packed with incident, betrayal and death, Luther is in a situation similar enough to be conventional, but not exactly replicated enough to be understood as an echo, or theme. We end where we began in a tangled hierarchy which works better when there is an awareness of its deployment (as in the Bourne series, which begins and ends with the drowning protagonist). Neil Cross reverts to this device not to create meaning, but because he understands that it is the correct way for exciting stories to end.

I was perilously close to falling asleep during the last twenty minutes of the second episode of Luther. It was clear that the show was going to be content week-in-week-out to feature a swathe of destruction which only the bearish Luther could prevent, while in the background other characters remained shackled to their roles as prescribed more by scriptwriter templates than realism or psychological depth. Then, during a confrontation between them, the murderess Alice called Luther her friend, and – after initially resisting – Luther stated “well, one coffee doesn’t make us friends,” and they stroll off together.

Rather than embrace this staggering mutual need, the show relegated it, and Alice’s complete inefficacy in the last hour – when she should have come into her own as a temptress pulling Luther further down the path of self-justified violent action – was one of the final nails in Luther’s coffin (by my count, the most important contribution she made was making Luther a cup of tea).

In sacrificing logic, character and originality at the altar of the wilful need to entertain, the show undermined even its own minor pleasures. The resolution it offered was nothing more than stock – like gravy without a meal to go with it. Of all the things it was trying to prove – that the BBC can make primetime television as good as America, that lead Idris Elba is star enough to carry a show, etc. – Luther succeeded only in showing that drama without investment is so cheap as to not be worth bothering with.

Big Nowhere: A Review of 'The Killer Inside Me'

The question of whether the depiction of violence is morally justifiable has been cropping up a lot in discussions of Michael Winterbottom’s new work ‘The Killer Inside Me’. The issue is certainly one worth exploring, but gives the impression that the film itself is an ‘8mm’ style investigation into the intersection of realism and fakery, violence and pornography, titillation and culpability. It is none of these things, instead settling for a slick, shallow-feeling noir with some seriously upsetting sequences, which utilises ambiguity a lot more than its occasional upfront brutality would suggest.

Casey Affleck plays small-town cop Lou Ford, an aw-shucks simpleton with a pretty fiancé and a penchant for stovetop coffee and classical music. Or at least that is what Lou himself thinks the rest of the town take him for, when in truth he carries the sickness – a compulsion to murder women, boys, and anyone else he can convince himself is an impediment to his half-baked schemes. Or at least, sickness (always italics) is what it is termed in the original 1952 novel by dime-store noir master Jim Thompson. The film itself suggests a Freudian web of troubling childhood episodes, Winterbottom calls it schizophrenia in interviews, while Affleck’s own performance suggests a self-deluded sociopathy.

This grey indeterminacy at the heart of the drama is what both makes it a hollow and unconvincing experience as well as a compelling and tense one. The reconcilement of such opposites is reminiscent of Emile Zola’s 1890 novel La Béte Humaine, in which various steamy affairs and murderous impulses are all simmered together in an overpoweringly gothic stew which makes nods towards social relevance, but only ever satirically so.

‘The Killer Inside Me’ flirts with the gothic in the dark impulses of the characters, but retains a blandly art deco façade. It is this matter-of-factness that makes the killings so vicious and potentially offensive, not just the calm way they are filmed or the bizarre continued devotion that everyone seems to still feel for Lou even when he is beating their face to a pulp. This disassociation from the protagonist and the film-makers intentions (the narrative has such a recycled clean-break-gone-wrong framework as to be almost invisible) threatens to estrange the audience; the sustained depiction of it pulls us back, forces us to re-associate with what we are witnessing in a way that Lou does not. These are ideas Quentin Tarantino has been playing around with for a decade now; unsurprisingly, Winterbottom’s clear-eyed commitment to them is more rewarding.

These killings, which stand so proud and vital within both the film and discussions about it, threaten to overshadow the rest of ‘The Killer Inside Me’. If they are not allowed to do so then the weaknesses surrounding them begin to reveal themselves: the ambling plotting, the disconnected final reel, the often sub-par musical choices, the plainness of the filming which seems ill-at-ease with what Winterbottom states is intended to be such a subjective experience of a killer’s own mindset. Such analysis reveals further how the film plays with violence as a structuring device, a marketing ploy, a (non)pleasure to be focussed upon at the expense of all else. Kathryn Bigelow does much the same in her cinema, and lays herself open to the same accusations of relying upon the very conventions she exposes.

The entertainment to be found in ‘The Killer Inside Me’ is not of the visceral variety, nor the generic. These pleasures are offered, but critiqued and disregarded to the extent that to come away from the film praising the shooting, or the cleverness of the plot, would be somewhat perverse. Lou, it turns out, is unaware that he has not quite pulled the wool over the eyes of those around him as successfully as he thought, and this revelation further complicates the interaction between the film and the spectator. Like Lou, we aren’t sure quite whether we are as secure in our received narrative as we seem, and like those around him we don’t understand what the motives for the crimes we witness are. These misgivings, and not the fierceness of the violence, are what offer ‘The Killer Inside Me’ its power.

Speaking Of The Apocalypse: A Review of 'Pontypool'

It is true of films as it is of people that they can be too smart for their own good. They utilise their cleverness to outsmart you, leaving you befuddled and – maybe – impressed, but certainly not rewarded. As a result of successes such as ‘The Usual Suspects’ and ‘The Sixth Sense’ the last fifteen years have seen the prevalence of the “twist ending” grow, such reversals inevitably becoming either rote and expected or unfathomable and bewildering. It is a rare film (and, indeed, person) that employs cleverness not to outwit you but to reward you, and that has enough faith to methodically reveal its treasures without feeling the need to hurriedly pull the rug from under you lest you become fidgety.

‘Pontypool’ is such a prize experience, and even if it did not feature a mesmerising central performance, subtly rich atmospherics and confident use of a small budget, it would deserve acclaim simply for thinking its ideas through properly and trusting the strength of an interesting concept.

It would be discourteous to speak too much about what these ideas are, as coming to the film cold is a distinct advantage, even though it lacks overt narrative surprises. Suffice to say that it is set in the radio booth of a local station for a small Canadian town, into which strange reports come concerning the behaviour of the locals. Rather than venture beyond the borders of the converted church of Radio 660 the film instead becomes tighter, more claustrophobic, genuinely engrossing and quietly horrific.

“Mrs French’s cat is missing…” intones Stephen McHattie’s Grant Mazzy in the film’s opening, and his gravel-hued voice subsequently offers the viewer what seems a solid anchor, even as more and more clues suggest that it is language that is what should be feared in this world.

We return to the missing cat several times in the film in ways which are easy to overlook: this is just one subtle repeated idea which is used to provide a structure which, the more it is developed, questions the very nature of structure itself. Does the repetition of an idea create meaning or destroy it? Familiarity is vital to successful discourse, and rhetoric thrives on repetition, so what would be the consequences of a requirement to de-familiarise oneself from the things that, arbitrarily, are concrete?

These might be strange questions, and I am being purposefully vague, but it is clear ‘Pontypool’ is playing games with the idea of apocalypticism, and the film would be best read with recourse to James Berger’s rewarding book-length study of end-time thinking ‘After The End.’ In it, Berger speaks of the trauma of the apocalypse rendering the event itself unreadable, and texts from the Bible onwards cop out by conceiving of the post-apocalyptic in pre-apocalyptic ways: in the Book of Revelation, when an angel “measures the new Jerusalem, it uses preapocalyptic, human measures.” It should be left to another reviewer less cautious of spoilers to investigate the film as it relates to Jacques Derrida’s concept of language and the “absent referent”, but ‘Pontypool’ should certainly be seen as grappling with serious issues regarding apocalypticism, a way of thinking which can so easily lead to lazy satire (‘Zombieland’) or unenlightening teleological religiosity (‘I Am Legend’).

If such sociological enquiry fails to get your blood pumping, then never fear – there are plenty of well-handled shock moments, including a nasty ‘cold-turkey’ sequence which, apart from its overwrought punch line, is quietly but pervasively upsetting. These and other moments of tension are insidiously effective, and make ‘Pontypool’ one of the best films I have seen in recent years. Seek it out. Just make sure when in company who have yet to see it you force yourself to be as tight-lipped as the tagline demands: “Shut Up Or Die!”

22 Things I Learned From 'Robin Hood'

1. We have Robin Hood to thank for the Magna Carta.

2. It takes a band of men less than a week to sack a dozen towns from York to Peterborough.

3. All English monarchs are idle, self-involved and idiotic. French monarchs are strategically minded, cunning, and intelligent.

4. ‘The Odyssey’ is a strange, but welcome, inspiration for the second act of a movie with this subject matter.

5. Robin Hood is a ‘Big Society’ Tory.

6. Women may command troops in battle, but only if their troops consist of children, and their presence is in no way vital or commented upon.

7. The repeated use of day-for-night filming techniques in the twenty-first century smacks first of genius, then of weirdness, and finally of boredom.

8. French rapists prefer cunnilingus.

9. Director Ridley Scott can do ‘historical epic’ in his sleep, but ‘cheeky family fun’ is not his forte.

10. Historical accuracy be damned: Cate Blanchett demands foundation and she demands it by the ton.

11. Convoluted scripts aren’t necessarily good scripts.

12. Innuendo-laced comments about Little John are funny.

13. Mark Addy’s boisterous portrayal of Friar Tuck is most avowedly not funny.

14. Protagonists in Hollywood fare must find meaning and purpose only through a new understanding of what a great man their father was (see also ‘Iron Man 2’, ‘Star Trek’)

15. When the hero rides towards battle a subordinate must throw him a sword.

16. Even when creeping political correctness demands an absurdly re-imagined Maid Marian, it is still acceptable to vilify both the Church and the French.

17. If you’re going to feature a beach-based swords-and-arrows battle as your climax, why not go ahead and make a movie about the Battle of Marathon instead?

18. There was more twelfth century ambience in thirty seconds of the recent ‘Valhalla Rising’ than there is in all 140 long minutes of this.

19. Peter Jackson should sue for royalties.

20. Robin Hood spent more time launching military campaigns on the seashore than he did as an outlaw in the woods.

21. When the animated closing credits of your film are more ingenious – and bloodier – than what has come before, there’s something amiss.

22. If this is the best this creative team can come up with then the inevitable sequels are going to be very hard work.

The Pieces Matter: A Review of 'Luther' (BBC1) and Thoughts On Dramatic Structure

A cursory glance at the list of reducible units of narrative deduced by Vladimir Propp from an analysis of Russian folk tales reveals that his work remains relevant and is fruitfully applicable to the new BBC television drama Luther. It is as though the casting of Idris Elba in the title role was justification enough for the existence of this weekly serial, and anything else in the work drawn from somewhere other than stock cultural situations and dynamics would be an unwanted distraction.

Indeed, Elba is mostly effective as intense London detective John Luther. Walking with a distinctive bob, and grasping his forehead when in contemplation as though his mind moves almost too fast for him to articulate, he’s an engaging protagonist, even if he is a carbon replication of Vincent D’Onofrio’s near-autistic detective in Law & Order: Criminal Intent, who was himself a more disengaged Will Graham from Michael Mann’s adaptation of Thomas Harris’ Manhunter.

While Graham’s psychological insights and instability were enforced onto the mise-en-scene around him in that film, Luther is unaided by simplistically cast supporting actors and locations. A child kidnapper (not rapist, presumably for watershed broadcast reasons) is run down in a cavernous and abandoned industrial site. A potential killer resides in a thirtieth floor Barbican apartment. The estranged wife (a Humanitarian Lawyer, so lots of chance for character development there) works in city office with glass elevators.

More derivatively, Luther’s immediate superior brings him back to the force after a suspension following the near-death of a suspect that still haunts him. His new partner is a fresh-faced rookie who applied “three times a week in writing” to work with him. Someone higher up the chain of command worries that Luther is a loose canon who could sink the entire unit. I could go on.

Perhaps a more rewarding task, however, would be to question why such elements are once again being trotted out. Partly, it is the sincerest form of flattery: director Brian Kirk (clearly a recent film school graduate) mimics the visual language of Heat-period Michael Mann, while creator and writer Neil Cross plays the unexciting trick of imbuing characters with a vague knowledge of their structural purpose (dialogue such as “was that the speech?” and “let’s have that talk where I tell you such-and-such” abound). This latter device is welcome, but hardly fresh, and was inevitably better done by Steven Soderbergh in the Ocean’s films.

Familiarity, of course, is a warm blanket, and we must be reminded of the following exchange from that masterpiece of satire Futurama, when Leela attempts to make the television show Fry has written more dramatic:

Fry: Married? Jenny can’t get married.

Leela: Why not? It’s clever, it’s unexpected.

Fry: But that’s not why people watch TV. Clever things make people feel stupid, and unexpected things make them feel scared.

Fry is correct to some degree. A genuinely dramatic piece of detective entertainment will perfectly poise the audience on the edge of realisation, but also make them rely on the final push to come from the protagonist. I wrote briefly in my review of Iron Man 2 about the tendency of Hollywood blockbusters to actively discourage audience involvement by crafting denouements so obtuse that we can only shrug in bemusement at their solving. Luther goes too far the other way, for reasons that feel lazy. We all guess that the gun is in the dog long before this is revealed because, in a scene that sticks out like a sore thumb, the dog is the only thing seen being cremated. During a coffee break Luther realises that the person he is interrogating is the culprit of the crime; returning to the interrogation room the suspect is clearly in on the fact that he now knows. Dramatic tension remains, but resolutely at a singular level. Multi-dimensional interaction is deemed too difficult. Rather than the villain seducing Luther’s wife by impersonating a normal person who was molested by the detective, she instead attacks the woman and hisses threats.

Another reason for the wholesale embrace of cliché must be related to the BBC’s budget and public profile issues, and the corporation’s hope for a “sure thing”. It is an unfortunate surrendering to populism, especially considering Channel 4 are both incapable and uninterested in creating anything as interesting as their now-finished Prime Suspect.

I never felt stupid during Luther, nor scared (even though, in the ruthless Alice Morgan, the show attempts to emulate Millennium’s terrifying demon Lucy Butler). At my most charitable I saw a production which was certifying itself in the fundamentals, before hopefully edging into more interesting territory. Unfortunately, these fundamentals consisted entirely of the aforementioned Proppian narratemes: the ‘Absentation’ or broken family unit, the villain’s ‘Reconnaissance’ of the hero (aided by Google), and even the ‘Receipt of the Magical Agent’ in the form of the fragments of the murder weapon. Such obvious formalist elements, presented straight as structural components, leave no room for the airless and uncomfortable moments of real life, nor do they allow room for the exploration of a drama at more than one level. The power of the scene in which the protagonist kicks in a door when he hears his lover is sleeping with someone else comes not just from the aggression, but from the raw directness of it among the multi-layered complications that surround it in the lives lived around such moments. Violence shocks because it is direct and clear, a clarity which is lost without a comparison to the muddle of the everyday.

The runaway popularity both commercially and critically (initially, at any rate) of the U.S. show 24 testifies to the fact that people enjoy entertainment that is not only very basic, but revels in how basic it is by recycling the same information scene-by-scene. Luther might not be this bad, but it certainly does not want us to be left in the dark, either in terms of plot information or character motivation.

Cultural theorist Fredric Jameson wrote in 1984 that to understand, or “cognitive[ly] map” the emerging postmodern world of digital connectivity and apparent creeping social homogenisation “will involve the invention of remarkable new languages and forms.” When I first saw Michael Mann’s (sorry, him again) 2006 film Miami Vice I thought that the first twenty minutes of that film might just be an illustration of such a new language, as it presented a world of simultaneity, complexity and unstoppable motion without offering a clarification beyond its visual existence. I now suspect that I may have been wrong, that the mapping of the psychology of the twenty-first century will take place through the medium of shows such as Luther, storytelling that reassure us that everything is deducible, that we are able to keep up, and that the only tragedy that can befall us is dramatic, and so understandable, and even cathartic.

Bunker Buster: A Review of 'Iron Man 2'

There are certain moments in ‘Iron Man 2’, Jon Favreau’s sequel to his own 2008 Blockbuster comic book adaptation, in which the thundering roar of machine gun fire is so loud and so insistent it begins to edge the spectator into a sublime state of disinterest. One wonders why they felt the need to crank the engine of apathy up to such excesses at these times when it seems to hum along just fine without the aid of special effects and boringly disinterested plotting.

Mercifully, these onslaughts come towards the end of the film, although we have previously been asked not merely to suffer through but to judge both sassy and dramatic a fight between two robots set to a remix of Queen’s ‘Another One Bites The Dust’. Up until this descent, there is much to be entertained by. Robert Downey Jr. reprises his narcissistic playboy arms manufacturer, playing Tony Stark like a cross between the young Howard Hughes and a less insufferable Tom Cruise. Favreau directs with commendable looseness, allowing Downey and Sam Rockwell in particular to improvise as though they did not have a $170 million production riding on them (the only drawback: editing together such ad-libbing leads to distractingly dire continuity).

The problems begin to set in around the halfway mark, or perhaps the novelty just wears off. Poisoning himself to an early grave with his own thrill seeking, Stark recklessly commandeers his company’s entry in a Monaco grand prix, but is cut down mid-race by Mickey Rourke’s vengeful Russian physicist. Between Stark’s lithe panic at being challenged and almost bested, Rourke’s monolithic determination, and the unexpectedness of the harbour racetrack setting, the scene comes close to presenting something akin to storytelling.

After this, it all begins to spiral away, Rourke is neutered, the Wider Marvel Universe (TM) rears its unenlightening and one-eyed head, and dramatic tension bleeds away to nought. Don Cheadle’s Lt. Col. Rhodes is an exemplar: moving through scenes like driftwood, he is given little motivation and no character whatsoever, but merely does and says what is required of him by an increasingly desperate script.

During a scene in which the intriguing life-sucking corollary of Stark’s heroism is solved in the laziest fashion possible, it is hard not to be struck by the realisation that this film, and those like it, actively discourage thought. Like Downey’s other franchise grab ‘Sherlock Holmes’, any mystery displayed here is so convolutedly both dispersed and minute that the process of attempting to grasp it is highlighted as futile, even stupid (yes, we all guessed it involved The Map, but the obfuscated digital imprint of an entirely new element?).

While the first ‘Iron Man’ offered an interesting schemata of contemporary terrorism and the dream of a one-man American war machine finishing the job started by the Bush administration, ‘Iron Man 2’ is happy for the job to remain firmly done. Having, in his words, “privatised world peace”, Stark now functions as a human nuclear deterrent, although the implication that his sartorial weaponry keeps any other countries from attacking the United States sounds less like world peace and more like a globalised national dictatorship. Either way, the games that are played and the battles that are fought are between American companies and different factions of the military industrial complex. Vacuously, the finale takes place in the same exhibition space as the film’s opening demonstration of technical superiority by Stark, and both are just displays of meaningless flash and bang, of exorbitant financial expenditure without appreciation for human collateral.

It might be too much to ask for such Summer Entertainment to contain the trace of drama, but given the scale of the production one is certainly entitled to question the lack of precision. Perhaps when those who are today teenagers grow up, and realise their cultural memories are made of cheap, plastic-covered nothing, they will have a creative recession similar – but worse – than that generated by subprime mortgages and asset inflation. Only the quality of the inevitable ‘Iron Man 3’ will give us any clue as to whether it will be a double dip.