Ladies and gents i'm going to do something and not bring you a review of an animated superhero movie and instead bring you a review of an animated .......................... superhero............................movie but this time it's by Marvel and not DC so haha. Yes I know that was a pretty lame joke but in all seriousness tho this is a review that i've been wanting to do for sometime so here is my review of The Invincible Iron Man.
The plot of the movie is Tony Stark is trying to raise an ancient city in China the trouble is that city houses the long dead Mandarin and a bunch of Chinese terrorists will do anything to stop it from being raised. Personally I feel that the plot of this movie is very weak even if you exclude the fact that that this film also doubles up as an origin story for Iron Man the main plot somehow feels weak and the origin part just don't feel as good as they perhaps could have been if a better writer was working on this thing.
Starring in this film is Marc Worden as Tony Stark / Iron Man , Gwendoline Yeo as Li Mei , Fred Tatasciore as The Mandarin , Rodney Saulsberry as James 'Rhodey' Rhodes , Elisa Gabrielli as Virginia 'Pepper' Potts , John McCook as Howard Stark , James Sie as Wong Chu. DC animated films have always had spot on casting but that's not the case not only for Marvel animated films but this film as well since the acting ranges from just ok to flat out bad there's no one in this movie who I can say is truly great in this film and that's a shame.
Not helping the film in anyway is the the fact all of the origin moments just feel rushed and I think that alot of that comes down to the fact that the live action Iron Man movie came out a year after this and they both have very similar plot beats. To me rushing those origin moments is a damn shame because how can we truly connect to Tony as a hero if we don't know him when he's an egotistical person.
The animation for the film was handled by Starburst Animation and I have no idea what else they've worked on i've looked all over the internet and i've found nothing. I can say tho that the animation in this film for me is a very mixed bag there are alot of scenes that look really good but then there are scenes were the characters look like there made of plastic and that's extremely off putting to me and it just doesn't look that good in this film#
The film makes use of CGI and oh boy the CGI in the film hasn't aged well at all I can't even make an excuse for the bad CGI because it's not early 2000's CGI it's mid 2000's CGI where we've had films that have had great special effects so there's no reason why the CGI in this film has to look so freaking bad.
I mentioned this very briefly early on in my review this film and the 2008 live action film share alot of very similar plot beats especially when it comes to Tony's origin story. Yes I do know that there's only so much you can do with his origin anyways but when you release two films a year apart from each other you have ti expect people to call you out on covering the exact same ground and I have no idea why they even chose to do it since people will pick up on the fact that alot of the plot beats in the live action film were also done in this film.
This is the third entry in the Marvel Animated Features which was something that not alot of people since Marvel only made a deal to make eight of these films. Honestly given how little known Marvel were when they started making these films it makes sense that a company wouldn't want to make that many films with them but now that there rolling in more money then what's in Scrooge Mcduck's Money Bin I see no reason why they shouldn't make more animated direct to DVD films since it would allow more lesser known characters a chance to shine.
To me everything about this movie is just average and that's killing me to say because this was one of the first Marvel movies I bought so it kills me to say that this movie is just average at best because it was something that I owned and chose to buy. I don't know what it is about Marvel but when it comes to there animated films they always fail when compared to DC and yet nine times out of ten they'll beat DC when it comes to live action movies.
I know that this is going to make a lot of die hard Marvel fans angry but it's something that needs to be said. Marvel do not make great animated films they just don't that will; always be DC when it comes to animated films nothing beats a direct to DVD DC film there films are always so well cast and have great animation i'll admit that in terms of story that will depend on the film but nine times out of ten they nail the story of whatever film there making.
In terms of what I thought about the action in the film it just boils down to who can hit who the hardest. For Iron Man tho that makes sense since he doesn't have any kind of superpowers so any of his action scenes will always boil down to who can hit who the hardest and nothing more. I will say tho that it's during those scenes is where the animation is at it's best in my opinion it's just a shame that the animation isn't that good in the rest of the film.
Overall this is a pretty average film it gives you all of the things that you'd expect from an Iron Man origin only it rushes through them all for no reason. So if it's a rushed origin story that you want then by all means check this film for me tho this film gets a 5 out of 10.