So, since I couldn't sleep anyway, I did something that I'm gonna go WAY out on a limb, here, and say that absolutely NONE of you would have expected me to do.

I watched Iron Man.

I had originally thought that I'd place my thoughts about this piece of cinematic crap behind a cut. Why? Well, because my opinion, as you would have previously guessed and can now confirm, is not in line with the rest of you. Knowing this, and knowing how much you all seem to love it, I figured I wouldn't subject you to my annoyed ramblings. But then, I had another thought, which was that, if I was going to type it all out anyway, then why hide it? A cut would have just been a cheap way to get you to read it, since you'd want to know exactly what I had to say that was so scathing that I felt I needed to hide it from random eyes. And, since you read me, then you know my typical opinions anyway, and would skip it regardless or not as is your choice. So, with all that said, fuck it, here I go.

Right, Iron Man. What a waste of two hours of my night. An hour and a half of weak story and weak writing, with just enough snark to make the fanboys happy with a few quotable lines, followed by 80% of the movie's budget crammed into a fight sequence that I'm being generous to call unoriginal. One-dimensional main characters, supported by cardboard cut-outs that are standing around as window dressing to a plot that wouldn't strain an elementary child's brain to write.

Honestly, you can't tell me that you hadn't figured out every "twist and turn" that the plot would make, within the first 20 minutes of this pablum. It couldn't have been more obvious if they'd written these glaring plot points in Day-Glo paint on the side of a building and then posted it to MySpace with a YouTube link. The spare chest glowie. The ice/altitude issue. The "left behind" pieces. The giant but useless reactor. And let's not ignore the awfully convenient moments, like the perfect positioning it took to make Stark hit the plane's wing so he could save a life, or the smack-in-de-face obvious War Machine sequel set-up.

Sure, I'll give you this, the armor looked good. It damn well better have.

I tried. You may not believe this, but I tried. I've seen posts all over my f-list this weekend, people raving about how fuckin' great the movie was. How it rocked, how it was the best superhero movie yet, how Downey was perfect as Stark, how action-packed and suspense-filled it was, yadda yadda yadda. So I thought "Hey, Sin City was amazing, and I've said many times that it was proof that you could do a comic book film and not make be standard Hollywood ballyhoo, so maybe this one actually hits the mark too, let's see"...

Nope. This is the same Hollywood fluff I know and loathe. Light, fluffy, as much substance as a cloud, carefully avoiding making anyone put any more brain-power into it than it takes to shove another handful of jujubes into their mouth. It was hyped, and it made money from the fact that it, like every other hyped film, gets lots of attendance when it opens because the American public has already shelled out it's cash to see last week's openers, and it'll be raved about and babbled about and lauded...until the next big hype-fest comes out, and then it'll be forgotten. At least until the sequel, when it'll start up again, and the fast-food merchandising will roll back out, and the 4-disc special collector's "Repulsor Ray" edition comes out, with the 2-pack of Iron Man 1 & 2 hot on it's heels.

In short, it was all that I had previously thought it would be, and all I hoped it would not be when I took a chance on it.