Red (2010) – Never read the Warren Ellis comic it’s based on, but it probably wasn’t as frothy and fun as this entry in the Happy Hitman genre. Bruce Willis plays the Retired, Extremely Dangerous (GET IT?????) hitman Frank Moses, who is being targeted by assassins for reasons I still don’t understand. Mary Louise Parker plays his accidental girlfriend — a bored bureaucrat/harlequin romance fan who quickly gets used to high-stakes spy work — with her patented braininess and habit of never keeping her eyes on the person she’s talking too. John Malkovich is the drug-fried paranoiac who’s actually totally right. (“He was secretly fed LSD every day for 16 years,” explains Moses.) And Helen Mirren, Brian Cox, Morgan Freeman, Richard Dreyfuss, and Rebecca Pidgeon (!!) make appearances. No one seems to be working particularly hard, but they’re happier blowing shit up and shooting guns than they might be in a Harry Potter movie.

Captain America (2011) – Surprisingly good, corny, fun, although I think the long Hydra set-up might be dull on future viewings. Chris Evans, who has specialized in playing flashy jerks, is actually cool, humble, and convincing as the skinny short guy who’s Serumed into superherodom. (I’m sure Transformers will win the special effects Oscar, but the CGI that puts Evans’s head on a shrimpy guy is really something.) Hugo Weaving plays the Red Skull with a Werner Herzog accent. There are just enough scenes of a dude flying off a ramp on a motorcycle as stuff blows up behind him.

What’s a good way to get over a stupid theft that puts you out >$1000? Watch some movies, obviously.

Transformers: Dark of the Moon (2011)

I was pretty bored by the first film in this series, and the horrible second one I only saw in snatches on HBO. (Several friends had the same joke on the way in: “Can I follow it if I haven’t seen the second film?” Yes, asshole, you can.) This, however, is a solid Michael Bay joint. It’s clear now that Martin Lawrence’s ad-libbing in Bad Boys II has convinced Bay that ALL of his characters, human or robot, should be socially maladjusted idiots. (Unless they’re women, in which case they’re either moony hot girls or frigid scolds.) Shia LeBouef’s Sam Witwicky may be the goofiest lead of a major franchise, ever — a jealous, bitchy, arrogant, whiny jackass, who is only useful when he’s blowing up robots. Why, for example, does he drive to the secret Transformers depot at DHS and yell at guards instead of preemptively calling Bumblebee to help him out?

But ANYWAY: Robots are in this, and they blow shit up. The other films in the series give us robot fights in barren locations or small cities. This one gives us a full-on alien invasion. And alien invasions are cool, what with the humans running away from danger in slow motion.

Gattaca (1997)

Finally caught this one at the stage when its futuristic design has become anachronistic. It’s very amusing to watch the newborn Vincent be tested for genetic traits, and for doctors to announce these traits with… a ticker-tape print-out! The twist at the end is silly but powerful [SPOILER: the cop investigating the murder is Vincent's genetically perfect brother, and the reason Vincent eventually outraced him is that he didn't save any energy for the trip back, which we can read directly into his Titan mission]. The dialogue and love story? Wonderful, actually sort of meaningful. I think it was this film and Wilde that made a star out of Jude Law, and deservedly so — he’s sleek, mean, and impossible to read.

Brief Interviews With Hideous Men (2009)

Just horrible. John Krasinski, the tall and handsome star of The Office, directs a bunch of David Foster Wallace short stories by incoherently stringing them together. I don’t think there’s 30 seconds of film without dialogue, and the IMPORTANT dialogue is announced as such with BIG BOOMING MUSIC. A bunch of actors you might remember from better movies and TV shows appear, read DFW lines, and disappear. Krasinski appears in order to provide a dictionary definition of smugness.

Nowhere Boy (2010)

It’s about time someone realized that the life of the young John Lennon was amazing drama. (Listen to Plastic Ono Band.) Aaron Johnson, the star of Kick-Ass, is amazing as Lennon — looks, accent, energy, everything. Ann-Marie Duff, who I can’t remember seeing before, is a wonderfully complicated Julia Lennon, whose interactions with John are as Oedipal as you can get without plagiarism. (I suppose the story is public domain by now.)

Rango (2011)

What a delightful kid’s movie — the best kind, with a Hunter S. Thompson joke! (Several, actually. HST appears in an opening sequence, and Rango’s hawaiian shirt is an obvious nod to the writer, whom Johnny Depp idolized and played him in the 1998 adaptation of Fear and Loathing.) The movie is cast for vocal talent, not starpower, so we get Ned Beatty and Isla Fisher in key roles. The action is as good as anything I’ve seen in animation.

X-Men: First Class (2011)

What Yglesias said.

Perusing the nominated films this year, I find that I have seen all the Best Picture nominees, all but one of the Best Actor/Actress performances (Biutiful), all but one of the Best Supporting Actor/Actress nominees (Animal Kingdom), and all but two of the documentaries. So here are my predictions for the winners, my haughty judgments of who SHOULD win, and my even-haughtier judgments of what else should have been nominated.

BEST PICTURE

Will win: The King’s Speech. Sure. Why not? It’s a terrific movie, apart from the problems Christopher Hitchens has laid out clearly and at length. It’s fun because, as some critic (whose name escapes me) pointed out, it’s basically a sports movie. Which brings me to:

Should win: The Fighter. My standard for greatness is “Do I want to watch this again?” I want to re-watch only a couple of these movies, but I really, really want to re-watch this. I loved the portrayal of Lowell’s white trash, the occasional gawkers looking at their verbal spats, the visceral boxing scenes, and all the acting — all of it, especially the characters who aren’t getting much buzz.

Should have been nominated: Four Lions. Chris Morris’s wonderful farce about terrorism deserved more attention than it got. Instead of: “The Kids Are Alright.”

BEST ACTOR

Will win: Colin Firth. I’m fine with that.

Should win: Colin Firth. You see?

Should have been nominated: Michael Shannon from “My Son, My Son, What Have Ye Done?” As I keep saying, he’s either a great actor or a crazy person who keeps breaking onto movie sets. Instead of: Jeff Bridges in “True Grit.”

BEST ACTRESS:

Will win: Natalie Portman. It’s the choice between gold-plating the box office star (Portman) and rewarding the older actress who keeps getting passed over (Bening) and I’d bet on the gold-plating. I can’t be the only person liking “The Kids Are Alright” less in retrospect.

Should win: Nicole Kidman. I don’t even like Kidman that much, but “Rabbit Hole” was the best I’ve ever seen her — more emotionally devastating than Portman because there are no pyrotechnics to help her out.

Should have been nominated: Hallie Stanfield should have been in this category, but she wasn’t, because of the horse race. Instead of: Michelle Williams.

At some point in 2009, while reading some website or drinking at a bar with friends, I learned that Seth Rogen would write and star in an adaptation of “The Green Hornet.”

“Hunh,” I thought/said. “That sounds like a horrible idea. On the other hand, I guess, who cares about the Green Hornet? I remember it was the show that Bruce Lee kicked 36 flavors of ass on, but I don’t remember or care about the character, so I guess this could work.”

Later, I learned that Michel Gondry was directing the film; later still, I learned it was “in 3-D.” Failing, for once, to do appropriate research, I did not check whether this would be a 3-D upconvert or a movie filmed with James Cameron’s cyborg cameras. Hey, Gondry’s an innovative guy, so it was probably the most arty experiment he could develop with… let me check… $130 million!

Alas, it is a 3-D upconvert. It’s a bad one, too. It’s one of many bad things about this lazy and miscast movie. There are only four or five real touches of Gondry magic. The movie’s interminable partying and dialogue scenes are artless and could have been filmed by Kevin Smith. The Gondry-esque scenes, like the first fight between Rogen’s Britt Reid and Jay Chou’s Kato, are perfectly fine, but make no real use of 3-D.

And Gondry’s touch is the best thing about the movie. Rogen’s script and performance are weak enough to make us question how much talent the guy had in the first place. Oh, I’ve always liked his performances. I’m not one of those people who think his act is composed entirely of sarcasm and smarm. But he wasn’t the breakout actor in any of his early projects. “Pineapple Express” was, like this movie, a combination of listless suspense and some fun dialogue, and that movie’s breakout actors were James Franco and Danny McBride.

At the end of every year I list the movies I’ve seen in some sort of ordinal ranking. I have yet to see “The King’s Speech” and some other Oscar bait, hence their absence from the list.

Documentaries are in italics. The general categories are in ALL CAPS.

PIECES OF FUCKING SHIT

66. Shutter Island
This is my bias: I despise the “it was all a dream” plot twist. I always have. That and the “it turns out the person making all the mischief was someone DISGUISED as the hero” twist have irritated me since they were used in lousy cartoons. Huge misfire, wasted cast, etc. SEEN: Netflix, Unalaska.

65. The Last Airbender
Not the worst movie of the year because it’s so enjoyable in its badness — it has the worst performances by young actors since at least Jake Lloyd in “The Phantom Menace.” Also, a Daily Show correspondent as the key villain? Good casting. I mean that seriously. SEEN: In-flight entertainment.

64. Cop Out
I give Kevin Smith a lot of leeway — I really enjoyed “Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back,” really, and “Zack and Miri Make a Porno” was survivable — but this was absolute dreck. Predictable, lazy, unfunny, giving me reason to doubt the talent of Tracy Morgan weeks before his HBO special confirmed that he’s no good without “30 Rock” writers. SEEN: Chris Chandler’s DVD copy, Delaware.

63. Saint John of Las Vegas
Plotless indie waste of time, with a good enough cast (Sarah Silverman, Steve Buscemi, Romany Malco) to avoid the direct-to-DVD fate it richly deserved. SEEN: Netflix streaming, DC.

62. The Twilight Saga: Eclipse
Why the hell do people like these stories? You mean to tell me that millions of young girls enjoy a book in which a key plot point involves the heroine rubbing up against a dude in jean shorts and no shirt so that she can attain his wolf scent to ward off vampires? SEEN: Download for iPad.

61. Blood Done Sign My Name
Quasi-religious Civil Rights era drama rented on the recommendation of the Flick Filosopher. Meh. SEEN: Netflix DVD, Amtrak from New York to DC.

60. The Human Centipede: First Sequence
Best parts: The title and the ending. SEEN: Ben Miller’s house, on demand.

59. Daybreakers
The cure for vampirism is sunlight-plus-not-dying? Fuck you. SEEN: Netflix DVD, DC.

58. Chloe
Atom Egoyan scrapes the barrel. Good lesbian sex scenes, I guess, if you’re into that. SEEN: Netflix DVD, DC.

MERELY MEDIOCRE

57. The Losers
Ebert loved this for some reason; I thought it was toothless and rote, with one of the year’s worst performances from Jason Patric as the villainous Max. SEEN: Download, iPad.

56. The A-Team
Basically the same thing. SEEN: Ben Miller’s house.

55. Dinner for Schmucks
Mostly interesting for how it gets around a modern problem — cell phones make it difficult to get into goofy situations without someone eventually calling you — with a lazy kludge. Everybody leaves his phone in the wrong place! Duuuueeeehr! An incredible waste of talent with a confusing “message.” SEEN: Airline movie.

54. City Island
Stupid sitcom humor made worse by my least favorite actress, Emily Mortimer. Andy Garcia is one of those great Actors Who Never Made It, and we see why here. SEEN: Netflix DVD.

53. Survival of the Dead
George Romero’s decline continues with a messy, but very well-gore-infused, story about a family feud between Irish people on an island “off the coast of Delaware.” SEEN: Netflix DVD

52. Alice in Wonderland
I actually liked “Charlie and the Chocolate Factory,” unlike a lot of people, but this? Meh. Nice set design and character design that looked a little lazy post-Avatar, generic plot. Also, the Johnny Depp dance at the end was… yeah, well, that. SEEN: Theater, 3-D

51. Green Zone
Why not just make a real movie about the Iraq War? SEEN: iPad

50. Youth in Revolt
Way to fuck up Michael Cera’s image right before Scott Pilgrim. I guess I dug the animation. SEEN: Netflix DVD

49. The Most Dangerous Man in America: Daniel Ellsberg and the Pentagon Papers
Mediocre. SEEN: Netflix

48. Percy Jackson and the Olympians: The Lightning Thief
The best of Chris Columbus’s three adaptations of children’s fantasy novels. Uma Thurman, though: WTF? Seen: HBO

47. The Book of Eli
How do these people survive so long without water? Fine Michael Gambon cameo. Seen: iPad

WORTHWHILE

46. MacGruber
Surprisingly fun, considering the reviews. The scenes in which MacGruber explains how his arch-enemy came to hate him — for a perfectly good reason! — make the movie.

45. The Crazies
44. Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps
43. Agora
42. Morning Glory
41. Salt
40. Predators
39. The Killer Inside Me
38. Get Low
37. Edge of Darkness
36. Harry Brown
35. I Am Love
34. The Ghost Writer
33. Smash His Camera
32. Iron Man 2
31. The Runaways
30. My Son, My Son, What Have Ye Done?
29. Cemetary Junction

GOOD MOVIES

28. Who Is Harry Nilsson?
27. Hot Tub Time Machine
26. Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, Part One
25. The Town
24. Please Give
23. I Love You, Philip Morris
22. 127 Hours
21. How to Train Your Dragon
20. Get Him to the Greek
19. Life During Wartime
18. Easy A
17. Greenberg
16. Kick-Ass
15. Blue Valentine
14. Black Swan

GREAT MOVIES

13. Marwencol
12. The Kids Are All Right
11. Catfish
10. Joan Rivers: A Piece of Work
9. Winter’s Bone
8. Inception
7. True Grit
6. Four Lions
5. The King’s Speech
4. The Social Network
3. Toy Story 3
2. Scott Pilgrim vs. The World
1. Restrepo

True Grit (2010) – The Coen brothers’ adaptation of this story stays closer to the novel than the 1969 version, but borrows some scenes directly from the John Wayne classic. Observe:

Very good dialogue and acting, and I’d recommend it to anyone, but it seems like minor Coen.

The Twilight Saga: Eclipse – Why the fuck do people like these movies so much? I cannot say. I didn’t enjoy this: Every story beat was obvious several beats in advance, the dialogue was terrible, the action was rote. I will say that love triangle was amusing despite the complete uselessness of Bella Swan — her father and Jacob are the only tolerable parts of the enterprise, with their relentless sarcasm and disbelief that Bella can be so consistently stupid in her decision-making. But I really wonder what happened to the whole “vampires sparkle in sunlight” thing. Nobody sparkles!

Agora – From the director of “The Sea Inside” and “Open Your Eyes” comes, surprisingly, a two-dimensional swords-and-sandals epic about science and religion in Roman Egypt at the moment that Christianity took over.

Dinner for Schmucks (2010)
Ugh. I get the inspiration here — develop script full of goofy situations, get some of today’s bigger and more credible comedy stars to be in it, voila. When you cast Steve Carrell you remember that his breakout role was Brick Tamland in “Anchorman,” and surely a movie full of Brick Tamlandisms should be funny. I’m just not sure why it was so fitfully funny. Is it my dislike of mistaken identity plots, which are so forced here that they require two characters constantly misplacing their cell phones? Is it that we’re asked for too many reactions to Carrell’s character — sympathy, annoyance, empathy? Not a terrible movie, but not very good.

The Last Airbender (2010)
If it wasn’t for “Sex and the City 2″ (and I refuse to consider even of those movies canon) this would be the most entertainingly-reviewed film of 2010. And sure, it’s a piece of shit. Our child stars have apparently been instructed to act exactly like anime characters, with wide eyes and excitable dialogue. (The female, uh, lead, is one of the worst child actors in history.) The special effects are ripped from a direct-to-video “Mortal Kombat” sequel. There are no stakes, no surprises. There are many funny lines that sound as stupid in context as they do out of it. “I am sorry. I forgot to tell you before. If you failed the test, as all others have, you would have been free to go.”

Please Give (2010)
The latest in Nicole Holofcener’s series of pleasing, plot-light, low-stakes portraits of upper middle class people with problems. It might be her best, though, because the plot device is at least sort of interesting — a well-off couple run a store that sells antiques purchased from the recently deceased, and they befriend (or co-exist) with the granddaughters of a neighbor they plan to ransack. (They’ve actually bought her apartment and plan to demolish it to expand their own.) Only Rebecca Hall’s sweet character (also named Rebecca) has any apparent morals; everyone else is an entertaining mess.

Four Lions (2010)
If you hear this description — “four bumbling Islamic terrorists plot an attack on the London marathon” — and don’t run screaming, you’ll like this. I loved it, smiling through a few awkward patches, wincing at the family drama (our hero Omar’s loving suburban family are excited about the prospect of their patriarch blowing himself up), and losing it at some of the funniest bits of the year. (The sequence in which two sharpshooters quibble over whether they’ve shot a man in a “bear” costume or a Chewbacca costume is evil and sublime.) I’m glad Chris Morris escaped from the sitcom slum to make this, and now I want him to go further.

I adored this movie. I adored in the way the Younger Dave used to hoard VHS cassettes of anime and Kevin Smith and Whit Stillman movies, and watch them over and over again. I adored it more than I’d expected to because early reviewers said things like this:

Who cares if Scott winds up with Ramona, Knives, or anyone else? Described by his own sister (Anna Kendrick) as “chronically enfeebled,” he makes an implausible lady-killer—and even less of a fighter, despite his innumerable bouts against Ramona’s other beaux. These are staged and filmed as if they were video games, all painless panic, and they are best taken as Scott’s inward reveries of a power that he will never possess. I strongly suspect, in fact, that he stayed in bed and dreamed the whole sweet movie. Call it “Inception” for geeks.

Stupid geeks! What’s wrong with you idiots, taking all this pleasure from silly fight scenes and an inscrutable love story? Go back to ComicCon, and clean your rooms!

It’s a goddamn shame that “Scott Pilgrim” (do you mind if I call it that?) hits just as the movie-critiquing profession gets over a couple of the nerdy trends that made it marketable when it was optioned a few years ago. The indie geek-who-gets-girl-despite-being-an-”ass” (as Pilgrim calls himself at one point) genre hit the reef sometime after “Forgetting Sarah Marshall.” Michael Cera, who became a beloved critics’ kewpie doll after “Arrested Development,” wore out his welcome with a series of mediocre roles, led by “Year One.” What to take out the anger on? “Scott Pilgrim,” obviously.

All the criticism is wrong. Judged as its own movie, and judged as an adaptation, this is a complete success. There is no weak performance; the songs, by Beck, Broken Social Scene, and Metric, are not just catchy but appropriate for the “bands” playing them; the visuals are really unlike anything ever seen in the movies. I’m talking about the effects ripped right out of 8-bit (and occasionally 16-bit) video games, but I’m also talking about director Edgar Wright’s dizzy editing, where conversations are finished across multiple scene changes, and title cards and narrations pop on and off the screen informing us without distracting us.

Let’s talk about the adaptation first. Wright was tasked with compressing a story that takes more than 1100 comic pages to tell — adapt every scene for a movie and it’s probably 6 hours — into around 110 minutes. He gets rid of some dross and loses almost nothing. Yes, I like the comics for the way they drag Scott’s romance with Ramona out over the course of a year, so you see them grow together, but Wright does a better job of making this action convincingly happen over the course of a few weeks than I thought would have been possible. He’s also extremely good at 1) adding jokes that jibe with the material and 2) adapting jokes that you thought only worked in sequential art. For the first example, I’m thinking of the lines he gives Brian Comeau in the double-shot scene (don’t ask) when Scott confronts Gideon. One of the times that Scott walks past him, we hear Brian in a snobby conversation saying “well, the comic was better than the movie.” That’s funny, but it’s the kind of joke you could put in any comic book movie. The other time we overhear Brian, he’s saying “the first album is better than the… first album.” That’s the kind of joke you’d laugh at in a smart indie comedy, the kind of joke that made readers love the “Scott Pilgrim’ comics, and Wright just threw it in there.

I mentioned the casting before — it’s one of the things that makes this work as a movie on its own, not just a faithful adaptation. Mary Elizabeth Winstead’s Ramona is a little darker and harder-to-get than the Ramona we saw in the comics. I don’t think we ever see her teeth when she’s smiling, and she disappears from the movie more than she does in the comics. (When she flat-out vanishes in volume 5, it’s a huge, heart-breaking deal.) We (by which I mean nerdy guys) immediately fall for the comic version of Ramona. We fall for this Ramona, too, her huge eyes that burn with obvious intelligence. We instantly love Kieran Culkin’s Wallace and Ellen Wong’s Knives, who’s given a lot to do here — so much that the audience is clearly torn on whether Scott should be with her, even though he obviously shouldn’t. (She’s 17!)

I don’t have much to say that doesn’t sound like gushing, so just go see the damn thing. It will make less money than it cost, and the smart kids will call it a bomb, and then the rest of us will keep watching it for decades.

I realize today, as I drink coffee and eat eggs in the sunshine, that I have seen only four movies in the year 2010.

“But, Dave!” you ask, lip quivering. “You watch like 50 movies per year.”

Indeed I do. But I rarely catch many movies before the summer. There are reasons for this. 2010-specific reasons include the fact that I am dating a smart, strong and beautiful woman and we have a lot of other things to do.* Every-year-specific reasons are that if a movie is released before, say, August, I can catch it on DVD or — now — streaming Netflix by the end of the year. So while I’ve failed to see A Prophet and Greenberg so far, I will by, like, November. The big blockbustery nonsense I HAVE seen:

Alice in Wonderland – Wow, really not that great. You don’t have to pine for feminist heroism in every movie to be confused and disappointed that the headstrong, take-no-shit little girl of Lewis Carroll’s story has been turned into a bland, scared, clinging-to-Johnny-Depp action figure. I liked Ann Hathaway’s little hand motions and basically everything from Helena Bonham Carter. And I guess I like that this movie seems to have sparked the neo-3-D backlash.

Hot Tub Time Machine – I almost don’t want to see anything else in 2010 so I can say that Crispin Glover was in 50% of the films I saw. His ongoing gag is a highlight of this movie that almost excuses the really radical sexism (Haha that black guy’s wife made him hyphenate his name!) and missed opportunities to mock 80s cliches. But I generally liked this, especially the embrace of completely amoral behavior. (Did Rob Corddry murder Vince Neil or something?)

Kick-Ass – Also, 50% of the films I’ve seen this year have featured Clark Duke. Probably my favorite film of the year so far, an improvement on Mark Millar’s overwritten comic in a lot of ways.

*Like CONCERTS. That’s what I mean.

I don’t read many movie reviews any more, but I assume the libertarian embrace of Iron Man 2 (2010) is in full swing. Insofar as it has a message, it was lifted by screenwriter Justin Theroux from Ayn Rand. “I have successfully privatized world peace!” says Tony Stark (Robert Downey Jr.), dressing down a panel of weaselly senators who want to take his technology away from him. “I’m tired of the liberal agenda,” says Stark to his assistant Pepper Potts (Gwenyth Paltrow), in a line that doesn’t make a lot of sense (he’s tired of spending money on projects that look good for his company) except as a dog whistle to tea partyers. Stark’s biggest foil is Justin Hammer, a government contractor/moron played by Sam Rockwell as the best reason to cut federal spending since Ronald Reagan bashed “welfare queens.”

The problem, as with so many attempts to inject real world relevance and politics into a super hero movie,* is that the message doesn’t really make sense. There’s no sense that Stark’s agenda is any different than Uncle Sam’s — he’s not, as Warren Ellis’s or Mark Millar’s heroes sometimes do, neutering the United States and leveling the playing field between the first and third worlds. And as stupid as Hammer is, his downfall comes not from punishing the innovation of private operators as it comes from hiring as his lead developer a Russian psychopath (Mickey Rourke) who uses his government contract to carry out a vendetta against Stark.

I had fun during Iron Man 2. Downey and Rockwell are given lots and lots of scenery to chew, and they take to it like termites. Director Jon Favreau does some wonderful work with the cliches of the genre and the series, like an angry video chat (in the heat of battle) between Stark and Potts, a 3-D supercomputer projection whose images can be crunched up and tossed into (also imaged) basketball hoops, a souped-up version of the Iron Man armor that folds into a suitcase.

But in Iron Man (2008), Stark is forced, again and again, to invent his way out of a crisis. He puts together his original, clunky Iron Man armor in a frantic race to save his life from terrorists. He develops his improved armor as he experiments on ways to keep his nuclear-powered heart alive — one of my favorite scenes in the film was the screwball “fix my heart, fast!” surgery with Potts. We know that the armor he’s inventing would never really work, but it’s fun watching how long it takes to figure out each kink.

There’s significantly less of this in Iron Man 2 — inventing new armor becomes an easy action movie task along the lines of making an 18-wheeler explode with a well-timed shotgun blast. It takes Rourke’s Ivan Valko six months to create his first bootleg arc generator and energy whip, which he uses to face down Iron Man at a racetrack. (As my friend Phil Klein asked in the dark theater, how is Valko the only person in Monaco who knows that Stark will race his company’s car? Not even the TV station knows.) It takes him approximately three days to create 18 armored droids and a suit of armor that improves on many of Stark’s designs. It takes Stark around a day — in a really moronic sequence — to realize his father hid the chemical code for a new element in a diorama, build a rube goldberg machine that synthesizes elements, and add the new element to his suit. (This element is necessary, by the way, because of a previously unspoken flaw with Stark’s arc generator that is poisoning him, and for some reason toxifies his blood by 24% in 6 months and by another 27% in the two days from the start of the film’s narrative.) Oh, and this — how does Pepper Potts spend her entire career working around sci-fi robots and NOT KNOW WHAT IT MEANS WHEN A RED BUTTON STARTS BEEPING LOUDER AND LOUDER. It means explosions.

Like I said — funny movie, two actors that produce one-liners like Rob Pollard produces lo-fi rock tracks, some memorable scenes of robots going shithouse on other robots. But fairly stupid, a little disappointing.

Also, Scarlett Johansen is in it.

*One exception here is the sonic spying technology invented by Bruce Wayne in The Dark Knight (2008), which actually makes a point about civil liberties, especially when it’s deactivated at the end of the film. And the X-Men films aren’t bad at this either.