Okay, I was too tough on Iron Man 3
Our chief film critic A.A. Dowd revisits the one C+ he's never lived down
Image: Graphic: Natalie PeeplesScreenshot: Iron Man 3 Film Features Iron Man 3
In my nearly nine years at The A.V. Club, I’ve written about hundreds of movies. And yet the review of mine that’s come up the most—in the comments, on Twitter, even in real life—is the second one I ever wrote for the site, during my second week on the job. They say you only get one chance at a first impression. This was mine—the moment when a large block of the A.V. Club audience first saw my byline, getting a taste of the sensibilities of the new film editor. To certain readers, I will always be the guy who gave Iron Man 3 a C+.
Who was this hopeless snob tearing down a movie everyone was excited for, a Kiss Kiss Bang Bang reunion in the form of a quippy superhero sequel? My predecessors—folks like Scott Tobias and Keith Phipps and Tasha Robinson, who had built The A.V. Club into a daily destination for movie obsessives—had been mostly positive on the early entries of the Marvel Cinematic Universe. More than that, they had established themselves as pop-culture omnivores, cinephiles who appreciated popcorn fare as much as art films. Fair or not, my Iron Man 3 review seemed to suggest, right out the gate, that I was actively hostile towards the former, and to comic-book movies especially.
That C+ followed me, at least in the days before Kinja decimated the site’s robust commenting culture. When I gave Star Trek Into Darkness a B a couple weeks later, it prompted a chorus of, “Wait, you really liked this more than Iron Man 3?” Several more weeks passed, and I gave a C+ to another highly anticipated techno sci-fi event, Elysium; business as usual, they all sighed, for the curmudgeonly critic. The rap had stuck so hard that I was getting credit for colleagues’ middling reviews; imagine my surprise to learn that I had thrown a C+ at Man Of Steel, too. (To be fair, I would have, had I covered that one myself.) Even my unqualified raves raised the specter of a lower grade, as readers quipped that I had only the two As in my pen name to spare. “C+ C+ Dowd,” they rechristened me, cleverly.
As with many caricatures, there’s some truth to this one. I can be a tough grader. Doing this job has only strengthened my conviction that most movies are neither great nor terrible but somewhere in between—you know, which is what the C+ fundamentally signifies. The silver lining of my stinginess is, I hope, that when I do go nuts for a movie, it counts for something. Be as selective with your As as I’ve been on this beat, and they function as a megaphone of enthusiasm. That’s the idea, anyway.
I also understand that my scarlet C+ didn’t really have that much to do with Iron Man 3. It was about the transition from one era of The A.V. Club into another (history is repeating itself in that respect) and about the hard business of warming to a new critic in the absence of the ones you’ve learned to love and trust. The C+ jokes were my hazing, a roast of passage from a loyal constituency. And if there are readers, current or lapsed, who genuinely still associate me with an opinion I expressed during the Obama administration, there are likely many others who have found some fondness for my critical outlook—or at least found more recent reasons to despise it.
Still, I’ve absently wondered over the years if I was wrong about Iron Man 3, the movie that instantly made my not-entirely-unfair reputation as a killjoy. Recently, on the cusp of my exit from The A.V. Club, I decided to find out—to rewatch Shane Black’s high-flying smash for the first time since 2013, and also revisit the short review (this was right before the print edition of The Onion stopped, putting an end to hard word counts) I wrote back in my salad days at a dream job I had somehow landed. Had I, as readers insisted, been too hard on chapter one of phase two of the Marvel storytelling plan that was consuming the box office and movie culture at an alarming rate?
The answer, I must begrudgingly admit, is yes. On belated second viewing, Iron Man 3 did not reveal itself to be some classic of the genre; like just about every Marvel movie, it’s too beholden to the formula of its overarching franchise to become a true vision, a work of comic-book-movie art like The Dark Knight or Spider-Man 2 or Logan. But it is a better piece of blockbuster entertainment than I said it was in 2013—a little wittier, a little weirder, a little more successful at coloring outside the lines of Marvel’s template. At its best, it plays less like its predecessors and more like a James Bond movie written and directed by a guy very gifted at making dumb action movies feel smart.
Plenty of what I didn’t like about Iron Man 3 on first viewing I still don’t like. The action, with the exception of that one great midair rescue sequence teased during the Super Bowl, is unmemorable. “Borderline incoherent,” to quote my review, was definitely overstating the point—it’s rare that you can’t track who’s fire- or laser-blasting whom in this film. But Black wasn’t immune to the CGI glut of the MCU, and time hasn’t been especially kind to the majority of his set pieces, including a big, nocturnal, drone-backup climax that sends a bunch of weightless animated figures racing across a green-screen oil tanker.
And I still think the movie is inelegantly plotted; like too many entries in this forever franchise, it struggles to tend to all the balls it has to keep in the air—to balance an old supporting cast of sidekicks and love interests with a new ensemble of allies and foes, to tell its own satisfying story while operating as a continuation of the arc The Avengers lent Tony Stark (Robert Downey Jr.) the previous summer. The first act is surprisingly clunky in its laborious setup. And you can occasionally see the phantom impression of multiple drafts and Marvel Studios committee input—especially in every scene with Rebecca Hall, who was originally intended to be the film’s villain and who is way overqualified for the fairly incidental role she ended up playing instead.
Yet this time through, the pleasures of Iron Man 3—the stuff that delighted readers angry at my lukewarm take—came into sharper relief. Nine years ago, I wrote that “Black’s most endearing experiment… is divorcing Iron Man of his iron. Never is the film livelier than when its hero, stranded in the boonies without access to his toys, has to rely on quick thinking and the kindness of strangers.” And truly, the film does seem to spring to life, like the disembodied components of Tony’s totaled suit, when the action shifts to a wintry Tennessee. In The Avengers, Captain America (Chris Evans) had asked who Stark would be without his tech. Iron Man 3 tries to provide an answer, through the tried-and-true strategy of making its hero an underdog again.
It also reconfirms what the first film suggested (and the second film had tried, messily, to capitalize on): that it’s Downey’s motor-mouthed playboy shtick that endeared everyone to these movies, not the scenes of his digital golem-avatar zipping across the sky. Black, who made it big in the late ’80s and early ’90s with his scripts for banter-heavy testosterone fests like Lethal Weapon and The Last Boy Scout, does his damndest to twist Iron Man 3 into one of his brash star vehicles. He keeps Tony out of the suit because he knows we really came to bask in Downey’s egomaniac wit and sarcasm. And he provides the actor bon mots worthy of that megawatt charisma.
On first viewing, I was disappointed that Shane Black had made a Marvel movie instead of forcing Marvel to make a Shane Black movie. Twenty MCU entries later, his Iron Man 3 looks like one of the more successful (and mildly idiosyncratic) attempts to wrestle one for him out of the mandate of making another for them. “Hints of the filmmaker’s personality poke through the Marvel house style,” I wrote. But there’s actually quite a bit of Black wedged between the boilerplate: the voiceover framework, the Christmas setting, the wisecracking scenes between Downey and Don Cheadle that suggest a buddy-cop flick smuggled into the movie’s margins. The most Blackian element might be the salty/sweet rapport Tony develops with a local urchin helping him off the grid. “Dads leave, no need to be a pussy about it,” our hero says to a literal child—a line I’d bet big money Black had to fight to keep.
And I still love the big reveal about Ben Kinglsey’s looming terrorist threat The Mandarin. The ending of the first Iron Man established its eponymous character as a celebrity superhero—a crime-fighter balancing his world-saving exploits with his life in the public eye. To that end, it was smart to confront Tony with a mirage of a villain: a bad guy literally invented by and for television. It’s also just a great, funny twist—and all the better for how much it pissed off some Marvel fans. (This franchise could stand to toy with canon, and the expectations of the diehards, a little more than it usually does.)
What I was really grappling with, between the lines of my mixed review, was the ominous feeling that movie culture and the job of being a movie critic was going to be dominated by shiny, zippy, quality controlled product like Iron Man 3 from here on out.
So, yes, I was a little tough on Iron Man 3. Anticlimactically, I must now report that it deserved a B- or maybe a B. What stopped me, I think, from going a little higher on the film is something that’s not in the review but might be the animating subtext of it: my own creeping fatigue at the Marvel industrial complex. The movies before The Avengers had all felt, to an extent, like they were building towards something. With Iron Man 3, it became clear that there was no end in sight for this franchise—that these movies were going to just keep coming, no matter the size of the crossover events they periodically fed into.
What I was really grappling with, between the lines of my mixed review, was the ominous feeling that movie culture and the job of being a movie critic was going to be dominated by shiny, zippy, quality controlled product like Iron Man 3 from here on out. That unarticulated anxiety is the kernel of truth in readers labeling me a superhero-movie hater.
And on some level, I do think the obsession with this one grade for this one movie was a preview of what all critics, not just me, would deal with over the years that followed: the accusations of being out of touch, of not appreciating the crowdpleasers “real” audiences have consumed in droves since. Am I suggesting that every person who ribbed me about Iron Man 3 was a frothing fanboy? Of course not—in part because some of those doing the ribbing were my own coworkers! But I do think one of the defining tensions of my line of work this past decade has been the increasing demand that critics mirror back audiences’ affection for these gargantuan spandex spectacles—or else! I got a taste of that conflict early on, and I’ve been receiving periodic doses of it ever since, particularly when I’ve dared to jump back into the Marvel-verse and assess the merits of a new toy off their assembly line.
Anyway, there are worse legacies than being the dissenting opinion on a generally well-liked Hollywood hit—even if that opinion was a little crankier than it ought to have been. I have one more film to review for The A.V. Club, and by coincidence, it’s another highly anticipated movie about a billionaire superhero with cool gadgets. “Your last review for the site has to be a C+,” former editor-in-chief Josh Modell jokingly told me over lunch a few weeks ago. For the sake of my own viewing pleasure—and my mentions—I hope I’m unable to fulfill his sardonic request. But there would be some symmetry in that, wouldn’t there? One last C+ for the road.
354 Comments
“We leave behind a being of extraordinary power and conscience. I’m not certain if he should be praised or condemned. Only that he should be left alone.”
I love Iron Man Three. Top tier Marvel for me. Maybe not in my top 5 of MCU films, but definitely top ten.
I honestly didn’t like it when I first saw it in the theater. Then I saw it on a plane and, despite having most of awesome plane action scene cut (duh), I suddenly found it utterly charming and I’ve revisited it a few times since, to my continued delight.I definitely like it more than the Captain America sequels and more than most Avengers movies, which I have very little interest in rewatching.
I was rocking with you until you threw those hot takes out at the end. This movie ain’t bad at all but I don’t find it to be top tier. Especially over winter soldier, civil war, infinity war and endgame.
Civil War and even Winter Soldier are entertaining, but fairly soulless affairs. The only Avengers movie I even have a hypothetical interest in revisiting is Endgame, which I quite liked, but to date, I’ve still only seen it once and can’t imagine when I’ll actually sit down with it again.
Yeah, I think the first Captain America is the best, and might be my personal favorite MCU movie. People love to point out Winter Soldier is “just like a classic 1970s spy thriller!” which, eh, sure, maybe…until it reaches the standard CGI orgy of a finale. Civil War is just another Avengers movie, and like those movies it has a lot of great sequences and character moments, but works better as a spectacle to be experienced with a bunch of applauding fans in a movie theater than a self-contained film.
Captain America: TFA may not be the “best” MCU film, but it’s certainly my favorite and the one I’ve rewatched more than others by a positively gigantic margin.
The first act of ENDGAME has acquired a fresh resonance in the post-Quarantine age.
It took my wife and I three nights to finish Civil War, and on the final night she said, “Why don’t we finish that punch-kicker movie?” And damned if the last act wasn’t three characters punching and kicking each other for half an hour. At that point I realized I was watching a three hour movie about my least favorite Marvel comics characters, and it became impossible to jump back in.
Civil War is just so incredibly boring.
I was really excited for it (even though I didn’t really enjoy The Winter Soldier or Guardians of the Galaxy). But man, what a mess.
Me too. Ultron, Civil War, etc. really felt like a steep decline happening. I gave up seeing these things in theaters right around Infinity War.
“This isn’t gonna change what happened.”“I don’t care. He punch-kickered my mom.”
Tony is 100% correct in that dispute, but the point of the movie is that it doesn’t matter because Bucky totally feels bad about it.
Fwiw, I’m sorry to see you go. It does feel like the passing of an Old Guard (that I, like many around here, am watching with trepidation) and we’re losing even more tried and true talent like yourself. And I can understand where you’re coming from with the grading thing; if you only give an A sparingly, then that A really means something.As for Iron Man 3, I find it more entertaining than 2, but it doesn’t hang together anywhere near as well as 1. I have always loved – and continue to love – the Mandarin Twist. (And all the more so for bringing it back in Shang-Chi.) In the pantheon of Marvel movies, this one sits somewhere in the middle: not amazing, but not really all that bad either.
I rewatched all of the Marvel movies last year and was somewhat surprised to learn that all three Iron Man films were in the bottom half of my personal rankings. I realized that while I enjoy seeing Tony bounce off other MCU characters his own movies are…eh. 1 is decent, and it gets brownie points for kickstarting the whole universe, but it gets outshone by subsequent MCU films. 3 has a fun twist and snappy dialogue, but is let down by the typical third act incomprehensible CGI laser slugfest. 2…um…uh…the racetrack scene is pretty good actually? But it’s all downhill from there.
I am not sure how 1 would not be in the top half. The other two, totally bottom half.
Like I said, it’s less that IM1 is bad, more that there are quite a few MCU movies I just like more.
I guess I disagree as I see it as one of the top MCU films (not counting the Holland Spider-man films as I have not seen those – I am hoping those stream somewhere for free w/ subscription soon)
How recently have you rewatched Iron Man 1? Because I would’ve said what you said based on my memory of the feeling of seeing it in 2008 but it does not hold up well at all
It has been a long time. To be fair, I did think in places it bordered on jingoism in places at the time, but other than that, I thought the story and chacters were pretty solid. Maybe I will rewatch soon.
I really like Iron Man 3, like it’s a near “A” for me, but the first two are surprisingly bad and the weirdest thing is that the first Iron Man just doesn’t hold up well at all. It’s crazy because the whole success of the MCU project hinged on that one movie and I’ve rewatched it recently and it’s pretty bad. Like nothing happens and the final fight between Tony in his primitive Iron Man suit and Jeff Bridges in his is easily the weakest climax of any MCU movie.
Because of Dowd, Vishnevetsky, and sometimes jesse, film coverage–specifically reviews–were pretty much the only thing that kept alive the old open-minded-but-critical spirit of AV Club. Depressing to see it go away entirely.Also, to be honest, this still reads like a C+ review.
Iron Man 3 is one of my top Marvel movies, I love that it was largely a Tony Stark movie, and the Mandarin twist was great. I was shocked that Mandarin had so many fans, he was always bottom tier for me, to the point that I wouldn’t buy a comic if he was the villain. It’s not like they even used him all that often, so I just assumed it was a character that no one really liked.
The old guard left a long time ago. (Phipps Tobias Murray Robinson Rabin etc) This is like the medium guard
Thanks for all the amazing work at the AV Club over the past almost 9 years Alex, and I look forward to seeing what you end up doing next.
I did not care for The Mandarin twist the first couple times I’ve watched it, but I think the next time I revisit it in a post Shang-Chi world, I will bother me much less this time around. I don’t think I was one of the people who gave you a hard time, though I want to say you have the gift that many great reviewers have where I can usually get a good idea if I will enjoy the movie from your review.
I definitely joined in in the hazing. If I recall, I made the quip about him using up all the A’s in his byline. At last, I feel seen! If I’d known that feeling was coming, I would have taken a shower first. And yet… even at the time I was fairly underwhelmed with Iron Man 3, which Dowd has sized up quite fairly here, and I’ve soured on it and the rest of Marvel’s output more and more over the years. For every film I’m remotely excited about, the next Thor or Guardians, or Sam Raimi’s return to feature filmmaking (that’s good!) with Dr Strange (that’s… can I go now?) there are a deluge of others that feel like homework.
“Benedict Cumberbatch contains potassium benzoate.”
Yes yes, we all saw Power of the Dog.
Hazing the AVClub reviewers was just a right of passage here. Part of this communities secret language. I feel like much of it has now gone. When is the last time someone brought up Dawes?
I hear Leonard Pierce gave The Batman an A+
who?
Truly, it’s the end of an era…….[sighs wistfully, gazing into the middle distance]….of cock.
CancerAIDS for you, motherfucker!
BONG
My friend. My old, old friend.
*tearfully* EVERY TIME I SEE NATALIE PORTMAN I FAP.
A lot of people enjoyed giving him shit even when it was unfounded. Affectionate hazing is probably the right description. Like back in the day when everyone called Noel Murray “Bitchass” for reasons no one can remember.
I’ve found the Mandarin twist holds up better on rewatches, even before Shang-Chi came out. When the movie came out, they’d put all this hype into it — The Mandarin is responsible for everything, it’ll be like Star Wars where we don’t actually see the Emperor until the third movie, etc. — and then you meet Trevor. Without the sting of what looks like a ruined surprise, it’s much more fun to enjoy watching Ben Kingsley just charm his way through a character that I honestly feel would not be possible with a lesser actor. The real offense, to my taste, is when Killian later claims to have been the Mandarin all along, chunks of well-chewed scenery practically visible between Guy Pearce’s teeth. At that point, it feels like the audience is being mocked for having believed in the myth of the Mandarin the whole time — what, this worthless, third-rate knockoff of Justin Hammer? I could buy the character masterminding everything, until he says that. And to be fair, that’s because IMHO Pearce is just awful in Iron Man 3. He starts off okay in the early scenes, both before and after the time-skip. But in every scene throughout the movie his performance gets a little bit worse — you can practically draw it on a chart — until it reaches the level of ‘fourth sequel into a Syfy Channel franchise.’All in all, the movie holds up pretty well on rewatches — a damn sight better than the second one — and it’s a lot easier to appreciate Trevor in retrospect. Especially after seeing Shang-Chi.
Yeah, Trevor himself is actually a fun twist, but once he’s “gone”, as it were, the movie has a massive villain-shaped hole that it absolutely fails to fill with Pearce’s hammy over-acting.Then again, I’ve actually grown to appreciate Iron Man 2 a lot more over the years as well, so maybe my opinion on this should be automatically invalidated.
Kingsley seems to have a lot of fun with the Trevor chatacter, so I didn’t mind the twist that much.
Alex, for some reason I can’t help but imagine you dutifully typing this out while a band of Mouseketeers in leering Kevin Feige masks hold you at gunpoint. Is everything ok? Slip a tangential shout out to Joachim Trier in your next review to signal if you need help.
I swear that was relevant to The World’s End!!
Does this mean you didn’t love The World’s End? Or am I misunderstanding?
In his review of The World’s End, which he gave a A-, Dowd offered a parenthetical aside that is plays like a farcical answer to Trier’s “Oslo, August 31st”. Though not nearly on par with the uproar over the Iron Man 3 grade this was taken by the commentariat as an occasion for some judicious ribbing, as we were deeply affronted by this recommendation of some high-falutin’ Scandinavian art house picture.
Be that as it may, if you happen to mention that The Batman’s sound design is “louder than bombs” or some such we will be putting out a ragtag search party.
<3 <3 Dowd
Has he been retroactively named by Grimes?
A- minus reflection on a C+ review.Excellent, amusing, spirited work, as usual, A.A.Thank you.
I’m going to rain on this parade slightly (sorry) and insist on adding Infinity War to that list. After all, there is a comment out there somewhere which given enough time I might be able to find where you did on reflection not rule out a B- instead.
Oh, now you’re making me feel nostalgic for when AV Club grades meant something.
Godspeed, Mr Dowd.
A+ A+ Dowd. You’ll be missed.
I always appreciated your reviews and I’m looking forward to reading your stuff elsewhere. Whatever my (myriad) issues with post-disqus AV Club, I thought the film coverage remained excellent and insightful. Disappointed to see yet another talented writer leave as the AV Club hastens its transformation into…I don’t even know what, at this point. Yahoo! Entertainment 2.0, I guess.
It’s pivoting to a bi-monthly curated basket of snacks.
The hardest hit was to music. I feel like I haven’t gotten a balanced diet of genres in at least five years. The CardiBcation of music has gotten old.
i can’t imagine there’s any money anywhere in music writing.
Can’t comment on the financial side, but Tom Breihan (who has done some great series here) still does excellent things with Stereogum’s The Number Ones. It’s always better when I know the songs, but he goes through the whole history and finds all the interesting angles (including all the film connections when relevant), and even the ones I’m not very familiar with are usually great reads.
I get the impression that a lot of people today think the old AVC comment boards were a hive of scum and villainy, but that’s way overstated, and the music discussions here were the greatest. On top of good music/reviews articles a lot of great discussion by commenters with deep record collections. Steven Hyden and Josh Modell are especially missed (and, of course, Leonard Pierce).There’s a bit of that spirit over at Stereogum but they’re a little too poptimist
Whatever Happened to Alternative Nation? was probably the best online writing on music I’ve seen, if only because it really captured my formative years with respect to musical tastes. I lived through that era and considered myself relatively aware, and still was introduced to bands I’d never heard of.
Absolutely. Too much of that kind of thing falls into cheap nostalgia, but Hyden avoided that. Great writer.
There was a fair amount of terrible commenting I think (Beth Ditto interview, anyone?) but in terms of music, Noel Murray’s Popless feature alone started and encouraged more great discussions of music than most websites will ever see.
Nah, fuck Leonard Pierce. I loved a lot of the music coverage here back then, aside from the occasional heavy coverage of whatever indie darling was interesting the writers at the time (Wye Oak anyone?).And of course, who could forget “We love the new Dawes, and here’s why you should too!” and the Alabama Shakes Dream Show.
I think this was a bit later (c. 2016?) but when they started to do daily short writeups that were literally slightly rewritten press releases (you would find other pop culture sites using parts of them), that was pretty much the end of AVC as a music authority. And yeah they had darlings who they protected (Jenny Lewis and Neko Case also come to mind–remember when they apologized for a writer giving a Case record a bad review?) but things like Hyden’s columns or their Gateways to Geekery could be brilliant.Pierce messed up (and I hear he’s a bad internet person these days), and in all seriousness he had to be fired but he had really interesting taste. I can’t imagine something like this coming close to post-2016 AVC:https://www.avclub.com/dub-1798219034
Those gateway to geekerys were fantastic. I’ve revisited quite a few of those over the years.
I would have given Iron Man 3 a C-. The third act is a mess.
Do you know what else sucks? Lethal Weapon. Shane Black has written 1 1/2 good movies. I’m sad to see you go, Dowd!
I can understand not loving how the third act came together and played out, but I have a hard time imagining people not liking that final fight scene. Dowd refers to it as unmemorable but it is so dynamic and full of life. Iron Man 3 was the first time it really felt like super heroes were worthy of being on the big screen to me
Unmemorable sums it up well for me. I can’t remember a single thing about the actual antagonist. Was it Guy Pearce? I remember Stark’s army of nearly autonomous robot Iron Men ensuring that there were zero stakes in the fight at the foundry or wherever it was and I remember Gwyneth Paltrow with a fire whip. I also remember the late in story complication being Pepper catching some sort of fire disease that was such a transparent waste of time that they solved it with two lines of voice over.Iron Man 3 was the reason I stopped seeing superhero movies in theaters.
It was super weird to me that the threat at the end of ‘Iron Man 2′ was Vanko and his army of Iron Drones, but at the end of this movie, who’s going to save the day? Tony Stark’s army of Iron Drones.
That’s fair! I think because in all action movies you always know the heroes won’t die, I view the set pieces less as how high the stakes are but how they set up the problem then how cleverly they can get out of it. Maybe I’m just a nerd but there was just so much creativity packed in with all his suits, and the different ways they kept getting destroyed. To each their own I guess.
“ in all action movies you always know the heroes won’t die”
But you know they might get hurt or have a loved one get hurt/die or just fail to defeat the antagonist. There is usually some risk of some manner of permanent negative outcome. Iron Man 3 was one of the more blatant examples that I’ve seen of the filmmakers going “LOL no.” to the hint of that risk. Because technology is what enables Stark to do superhero shit, technology is also the only limitation of his powers. Parts of 3 explore those limitations, but then they decided, “Oops nevermind. Now there are fifty Iron Men. No restrictions.” which basically makes him Superman, the worst of all superheros. Cool if you like that. I decided that style of storytelling isn’t for me.
The last two Avengers movies apparently did finally find something approaching actual real world stakes so I say good for them.
Lethal Weapon? The fuck???What’s your 1? The Nice Guys?
Kiss Kiss Bang Bang. It’s the only reason people who wouldn’t otherwise be making excuses for John Milius respect Shane Black. Have you seen Lethal Weapon in the past decade? Ignoring all of the elements that make it super duper dated (not the fault of the movie for being of a time and place) the action is, at best, competently staged (unrelated to Black’s writing) and the characterization shallow and hoky. Murtaugh = family, old, no running Riggs = Alone, sad, crazy, and all of the running. Police Boss = mad, yelling, more yelling. Sometimes there are women around.
Like it’s better than Running Scared, City Heat, or 48 Hours, but that’s a low bar to clear.
I’d say I’m sorry to see you leave, but I don’t know how much I’ll be visiting this site anyway after the mass termination. Let’s say I’ll be sure to find out where you end up next.
I’ve always appreciated the grading system that was used by my city’s old alt-weekly reviewer, which was one to four stars or a black dot. A black dot meant “not recommended”. As fun as it is to read the scathing reviews that justify an F, there’s not really a practical need to differentiate between films to avoid on a letter grade scale below C. One star meant that the film accomplished what it set out to do with the required storytelling craft and was recommended for fans of the genre. Most films got one star. Additional stars indicated superior film-making and the four-star reviews guaranteed a film that would be in his year-end top ten, because he sure didn’t give out ten four-star reviews over a year.
AV Club has gone from #1 to #5 or so in terms of websites I click on to procrastinate at work. I don’t peruse it nearly as much as I used to and I don’t spend very much time on comments. If there’s something on the front page that grabs me, I’ll click on it. Otherwise it’s on to the next website nowadays.
Which sites would you recommend for quality reviews these days?
I wish I knew. I’ve heard a few recommendations but none of them stuck with me. Maybe The Avocado?
The Avocado is a pretty good commenting community–a lot of former AVC commenters there–but has a little too much of a therapy-session vibe and it’s become a bit insular over time. And even though it’s kind of against the spirit of the site I wish they’d emphasize some features/writers; there’s good stuff there but a lot of fanposty things too. But it’s still probably closest to the discussions on Classic AVC, though not particularly close
Thank! I’ve heard of it in passing but haven’t given it a look yet. I will do now.
Polygon has attracted a few AV Club alums—including Tasha Robinson as film editor—though obviously the focus remains on video games and genre movies/TV.
Thank! I’ve got Polygon on my RSS. I’m not into everything they do, but there are always some well worth reading every week!
there aren’t any websites anymore. unfortunately you have to be your own curator and editor now. lots of good pop culture conversation going on on twitter and youtube, but you have to spend the time finding your people because there’s mostly bad conversation going on.
Very true! I’ve got my own go-tos in that respect, but it does take time.
The rebooted Gawker is quite good, they don’t have comments though unfortunately – the comments were always the best part of Gawker Classic. I usually checkout Longreads once or twice a week and cue up some long-form articles to read.
It’s probably #5 for me, too, out of habit. Most visits, 2 or 3 a day, I don’t actually click into any articles. At this point, on mobile, the first 3 seconds of any click the page is all ads as it clunkily loads, anyway. Ads on the bottom, and a giant one on the top that everything takes its time to accommodate
Good lord it’s gotten awful on mobile, particularly a couple weeks ago when you had the gigantic Acura ad taking up the top half of the screen and an Apple TV ad that would keep reappearing every few seconds even after you closed it. No wonder they’re phasing out long-form writing on this site. Reading anything longer than a paragraph is a massive chore.
I actually enjoy Jalopnik much more than AVClub these days. I don’t give a shit about cars but there have been some super interesting long form essays on rebuilding cars or what-not that have been great. Also some good stuff on aviation (which I am interested in). I also enjoy The Takeout much more. AVClub writing on pop culture over the past few years has been really vapid. At least with Jalopnik and The Takeout it’s something novel for me.
Likewise. I go to Jalopnik more than others.I used to read them all. Often. Now? AVClub out of habit, Jalopnik for quality, then Gizmodo and TheRoot as once a day visits. I probably visit them all as frequently as I did just AVClub 3 years ago.
The Root has lost some of its top people as well, like Jackson and Harriot. I didn’t always agree with them, but at least it was thoughtful and I felt I was learning something about a culture I’m not part of. At this point the articles are so predictable they pretty much write themselves.
Agreed. That’s why I read it, and I also feel the quality dipped without those two in particular. It went from a twice daily read (and I learned a lot), to about a once or twice a week. Harriot was the best.
Jalapnik’s gotten weird, though, considering how many writers over there seem to actively hate cars. Got the right politics, however.
I think there’s like five or six people who care or remember.
In retrospect, Iron Man 3 was a continuation of my biggest problem with the MCU: they turned Iron Man into a sentient deus ex machina. The bulk of the movies were a series of problems being solved by Iron Man inventing whatever needs to be invented to solve the issue, with absolutely no difficulty. This trend culminated in Endgame, when he literally invented time travel in a single afternoon.
Also, literal machinae in this one with all those drone Iron Men. Which, again, these things could literally run on autopilot, where’s the supposed hero/life balance conflict?
Yeah, towards the end I felt like his special ability went from “powered suit of armour” to “there’s an app for that”.
To be fair, in the comics, at one point Tony actually makes a superpowers app and gives it to a city full of people. Also, at the time, he was evil (because of some alignment-reversing handwavium), which is why they get a one-day free trial before they have to pay. (I’m probably misremembering and mangling details, I haven’t read the arc in question.)
So, they make him Syndrome?
IIRC it’s not superpowers, it’s just general “better you” stuff like fixing your eyesight (he actually cures special guest star Daredevil’s blindness… for ONE day… as a supremely dick move) or in some cases literally making them more attractive.
you never have to be fair to the comics.
It’s kind of weird that the Time Travel thing didn’t bug me ( at least there were discussion about the repercussions of time travel and what not). But the NANOBOT SUIT THAT CAN BE ANYTHING does.
Well, blame BP and Wakanda for that.
To be fair, the time travel stuff was built off of work by Pym and Lang. But the whole thing could have prevented if he hadn’t destroyed his army of Iron Man suits and had been able to bring them to Titan. Half of everyone in the entire universe got snapped because … reasons. Whatever the in-universe excuses, it’s clear the writers realized that once you have a character who not only is more powerful than at least half the Avengers, but can make unlimited copies of himself, it’s hard to retain the dramatic tension.
It’s certainly better than 2 at least.
Sure you’ll land somewhere great, and can’t wait to read you there. Thanks for keeping the tradition of real criticism alive.
A door swings open, letting a shaft of light into a cramped but cozy-feeling room. A few old lamps spill pools of yellow on the floor. The walls are lined with tapes, reels, and discs of every kind. Footsteps as a man enters the room.DOWD: Hello, old friend.A hunched figure, sitting at a table in front of a flickering screen, smiles widely.VISHNIVETSKY: Back again at last, Comrade Dowd. Come, sit. I have pre-Soviet absurdist meditation on revenge to show you. Also, coffee. Is good. Black and tasting of petroleum, just like old days.Dowd sits at the table as Vishnevetsky plays the video. They both grab their coffee cups at the same time.DOWD: It’s good to be home.
VISHNIVETSKY: Soon Ukraine will be ours!DOWD: What?V: Nevermind. More coffee!
I think the grade is fair. It’s an ok movie, not the worst of the MCU, but nowhere near the best. Mostly I thought Guy Pearce’s character had the dumbest motivation for becoming a supervillain: Tony Stark ditched him one time and he never got over it.
So is this where the “a C+ from Dowd is more like a B+ for everyone else” AVC adage came from? FWIW, Iron Man 3’s online reputation seems to get worse as time goes on, so when you think about it, you were just earlier than everyone else. I still find it hilarious that last year, you gave Army of the Dead a B, and Eternals a C+. I like both movies equally but thought they weren’t that good, it’s just that the thought of a Zack Snyder movie getting a better review than the latest MCU movie just felt so surreal.Always liked reading your reviews, sorry to see you leave.
I give this retrospective an A++. Gonna miss your reviews man, I respect someone who has high standards and who can be sometimes harsh. Best of luck wherever you go A+ A+ Dowd. My heart is at a C- at best, probably a gentleman’s d-
I’m just glad so many people here give an F.
C’mon now, surely you know anything in D territory is a gentleman’s F. There is no gentleman’s D, that movie isn’t even worth watching MST3K-style.
Oh maaaaan my honest heartfelt message included a hilarious fuck up. Well that’s what the AV Club deserves, attempted polite gesture but fails anyway.
Well they haven’t turned the whole site off yet, you still have time to redeem yourself.
Attempting to encapsulate all of a movie’s qualities with a one-byte letter grade has always been ridiculous. The world would be a better place if film reviews never contained letter grades or star ratings or any other kind of numerical summary.It’s different when a site like Metacritic assesses a review in order to get a general sense of how much the critic liked the movie, but the important part is the aggregation of reviews there. A Metacritic score is a proxy for “generally how much critics liked the movie.” Not “how good/bad is the movie” (there’s no such thing!). It’s useful for getting a sense of the critical response, but we can all find movies with 80+ scores that we hated, and movies with scores below 40 that we loved: sometimes our personal opinions don’t match the consensus, and that’s fine.Dowd, we’ll miss you, and hopefully you wash up somewhere that makes good use of your talents.
Exactly. You should know how a writer feels by the time you finish reading their review (and definitely whether or not they recommend you see it) without a letter/number grade. If not, they’re a bad critic.Also, without the pressure of saying “This film sits on this spot on our made up scale”, I feel like there’s more room to open up a discussion of the movie. Maybe it didn’t come together, but it made interesting choices. Maybe it was well-made, even enjoyable, but somehow a little too impersonal in a way that will stop anyone ever truly loving it. Some of my favourite reviews are the ones where the critic is metaphorically leaning forward and whispering, “Okay, you know *those* kind of movies? You know what I mean, those ones where you see the trailer and you go ‘Oh boy’? Yep, it’s one of those. Let’s dive in.”The AV Club, in its prime, was great at giving that kind of review. (The latter type is pretty much the basis of ‘Home Release Hell’.) They’ve never needed the letter grades.
And, of course, they didn’t have letter grades in the beginning. But the people got what they wanted.
The letter grades at least sort of make sense for movies, where they represent, albeit imperfectly, the degree to which the reviewer recommends seeing the film. Giving individual TV episodes letter grades, on the other hand, was always next to pointless. Depending on the writer, the grade either represents an episode’s strength in relation to the best the show can do—in which case you get commenters kvetching about their favorite show getting the odd B-/C+ like it’s the end of the world—or in relation to TV writing on the whole, in which case every episode inevitably and boringly receives an A or A-, because the AV Club only covers prestige TV at this point. Plus I just feel sorry for poor Dennis Perkins, who’s forced to write some variation of a “an uneven SNL fails to capitalize on the talents of [host]: C+” every week.
Yeah, especially if I’m watching something serialized it’s not like I’m going to skip a week of plot development because that episode got a weak review. It has no effect on my viewing behavior. Season grades make a lot more sense.
That too, and also the inherent difficulty of reviewing a serialized TV show without knowing how or when various plot threads will resolve.
The letter grades at least sort of make sense for movies, where they represent, albeit imperfectly, the degree to which the reviewer recommends seeing the film.Even that’s much too coarse: there are movies that I would absolutely recommend to certain people and absolutely not recommend to others, not just based on the genre or “quality” but on certain elements, e.g. I can’t stand watching movies about drug addiction, no matter how well-executed they are, so a letter grade (or any such summary) that recommends a drug-addiction movie would be a false positive for me.
The AV Club only reviews prestige at this point? Riverdale and shit, that’s prestige TV?I feel like it MOSTLY reviews garbage TV at this point.
AVC hasn’t reviewed Riverdale on a regular basis in more than a year and a half.
I still think “the degree to which the reviewer recommends seeing the film” is something still better expressed through words. “For the ‘Bond’ completists only”; “impossible to imagine what demographic could reasonably enjoy this fiasco”; “Those willing to put in the effort will find moments of transcendence in this three-plus hour meditation on legacy”, etc. The problem for me is I can never know if Dowd’s A and D’Angelo’s A have anything in common with each other. I may as well ask them each how they see the colour red.
On the other hand, an episode getting a letter grade sometimes matters to me. When it’s a TV show I’m not already watching, then it’s meaningless because unless I see a streak of “A-” in the review it’s not as though I’m going to randomly enter a series at the point of their best episode.
However, if I’m watching a show and it usually gets a “B-” or whatever, if I see a new episode has an “A”, I’ll wait to read the actual review until afterward and you better believe I’m cooking a nice meal and lighting a few candles in anticipation of my viewing that evening.
It’s also helpful when the odd new TV series struggles in it’s first few episodes but then drastically improves by midseason. It makes it so I don’t have to constantly be tracking how it’s doing because the AV Club is doing it for me. If it picks up and reaches great heights by the end of it’s first or second season, I might consider slogging threw the early stuff.
Or with the example of Parks and Rec, just start at Season 3 and you’ll be fine. There’s also lots of shows that do this where the early stuff is mostly inessential. Also, the first season of the US Office.
On this site, I often barely noticed the grade before diving into the review. It’s not like they’re highlighted in 80 point font. They read more like “okay, here’s a summary of what I thought about the movie, good, bad and otherwise. Oh, and a letter grade because I have to.”
I, on the other hand, always notice them, to the point where I actually added Stylish rules to my browser to hide the letter grade so that I wouldn’t be predisposed before reading the review.
Well realistically letter grades exist primarily to cater to people who are too lazy to read the review.
I know. But I think we probably all agree that there’s no good reason to cater to those people.
It’s amazing reading old film/music magazines that run reviews without a grade/star system/etc. The criticism was usually better because the good and bad elements could be teased out and considered without having to reduce it to one byte.
Counterpoint: Grades got us the sadly forgotten “War Horse good” meme after it got an A-, so they are good. War Horse good!
Au revoir, A. A. Dowd, or, as you likely spell it, C. C. Dowd.
A fair reevaluation, one that makes your departure all the more regrettable. Whoever gets your byline next will be lucky to have you. And now — ahem— I have some notes:* I think Iron Man III helped paved the way for the farcical comedy and emotional pathos of Gunn and Waititi’s Marvel films. I’m not claiming that Black’s film was a direct influence (although there is a similarity to fireworks finales of his movie and Gunn’s GoG II). Feige is a cautious, iterative film producer and it seems likely that he took note of Black’s comedic tone and dialogue. * The Mandarin Twist is a great idea, particularly because it is only a slightly exaggerated comedic take on propaganda and false flag operations. And, ultimately the best way to deal with an inherently racist caricature.* The action was adequate in visual conception, but all of Tony’s action scenes showcased his cleverness. I like his escape from his collapsing coastal house, where he uses different parts of his Iron Man suit to save himself, Pepper and Maya.* Gwyneth Paltrow is underestimated in this franchise. She’s the only Marvel love interest to have something approaching an adult relationship and that started with Black’s script.
Of the 3 possible grades, C+ is the best!It’s not a great film but if you give it a C+ you have to give Iron Man 2 an F-.
The movie sucked; no need for an apology.Very sorry to see you go, A.A. We’ll see you around.
Ugh, I’m kind of bummed to see you write this, because I feel like I’ve got one less ally. I’ve seen ‘IM3′ more than once and I still hate it; it’s legitimately at the bottom of my MCU list. And I feel like I always have to take a deep breath to prepare for defending my position.But that’s the thing about you, Dowd. I’ve agreed with some of your reviews and disagreed with others, but I’ve always thought, “He got it.” Whatever thoughts you had were the result of tackling the film in front of you fully and considering what you were given. I never thought you were a grump or a naysayer, just an actual critic. I’ll miss ya, and the weasels who forced you out of a job can drown in their own mediocrity.
Sad to see yet another good writer departing this sinking ship of a site but best of luck with your next venture!
As for Iron Man 3 I think a C+ is pretty harsh. I’ve a lot of love for the film and I appreciate Shane Black’s brass neck in taking the established Superhero formula and twisting it into his Christmas Buddy Cop ouvre. I try and shoe-horn it into my festive season viewing every year.
One giant plot-hole that does stick out however is that Tony Stark goes on a road trip from Tennessee to South Florida yet has to MacGuyver a whole heap of weapons from a hardware store? I’m pretty sure on that particular highway journey he could have legally purchased enough large-calibre, high-capacity assault rifles and giant fucking hand-cannons to arm a counter-insurgency without having to show as much as a drivers license!
I mean, Tony Stark gunning people down is a lot less fun and heroic than him engineering some gadgets.
That isn’t so much a plot hole as Marvel making a gun superhero thing that kids can watch.
Everyone seems to be leaving the G/O sites and I can’t blame them. Sad to see you go! As a side note, I hated Iron Man 3 when I saw it in cinemas but watched it for the 2nd time a few months ago with my girlfriend (who’s never seen it before and isn’t a fan of comics or the related movies) and we both really enjoyed it. I’m not really sure what changed, but it was pretty fun, great special effects, excellent acting, and the only complaint I have is that the alcoholic aspect of Tony Stark was a lot more about the impact on people around him rather than the personal struggles he was facing (especially considering RDJ’s past). Pretty sure that last part may have been a Disney thing though.
“Everyone seems to be leaving the G/O sites and I can’t blame them.”Context: Everyone’s leaving because they’re being forced out with absurd demands, like having to move across the country to L.A. without a cost of living increase.
the alcoholic aspect of Tony Stark was a lot more about the impact on people around him rather than the personal struggles he was facingThat.. sounds more like IM2 than IM3, really.
I know I read the original review; I can’t remember if I was part of the “C+ C+” crowd. (I doubt it, but I did find it amusing.) I also remember thinking the grade was fair at the time, and I was surprised to find someone who wasn’t just reviewing the movies with something along the lines of “another win for marvel!”, but was actually thoughtfully reviewing and dissecting the movie itself. I didn’t agree with every review, of course, but I did always look forward to reading them. Thank you, and good luck in the future. We the readers (however many of us will be left) will miss you.
Yeah everyone is too tough on Iron Man 3. (Usually because they say it ruined their precious Mandarin.) But Iron Man 2 is the real disappointment. I wish they handled Stark’s alcoholism in 2 as well as they handled his PTSD in 3.
IM3 may not be the best Marvel movie but it still has my favorite credit sequence in the MCU.Including clips from all 3 Iron Man movies is a nice touch, I thought
Law of averages: most movies are C+.We have Stockholm Syndrome for the MCU. Don’t forget that around the time of Iron Man 3, waaaaay more people than just Scorcese were openly wondering “really? more superhero movies?”. I wonder if the C+ had something to do with a “that’s enough now” attitude. But if the occupiers stay around long enough, you get a Donbas Republic and we all accept it.
It’s been great having your voice at The AV Club. Good luck with whatever comes next! Also FWIW, it might have been tough being the C+ guy, but at least you weren’t Genevieve Koski admitting she didn’t like Ghostbusters.
Koski was right!
at least in the days before Kinja decimated the site’s robust commenting culture It was about the transition from one era of The A.V. Club into another (history is repeating itself in that respect)Hell of a kiss-off piece, Dowd! Credit to the current editor for letting him run it, I suppose. Good luck with your future endeavors! I’m not nearly as histrionic about the future of AVC as most commenters—it has weathered one sea change, it will weather this one–but I cannot deny that it loses some of its uniqueness every time the site undergoes one of these shakeups, gradually turning more and more like every other site. Sometimes, I feel like I’m still hanging around at a concert long past when the band has left the stage, desperately hoping for an encore that will not arrive.
I will say, while I appreciate any lack of histrionics over the Future of the A.V. Club As We Know It!! (and imagine it has served the old-new guard well, ha), I would point out that past incidences of major exodus were either because a bunch of writers left together to start The Dissolve, or a few instances where several major writers got new (and presumably better) gigs around the same time. Of course, I’m sure outside factors contributed to *wanting* those new jobs, but (as far as I know, and granted, I don’t know a LOT), those writers were not forced out or quitting because they basically had to.So: notable, I think, to say that (again, as far as I know) the staffers and freelancers heading for the exit over the next month-plus are not doing so because they’ve all lined up better new gigs already. Nothing against anyone who comes up next but… they’re in for an uphill climb, I’d wager.
I mean, nothing will help, but I don’t see how histrionics really hurt at this point. A bunch of talented writers, comprising what remained of the site’s heart and soul, were all unceremoniously laid off—excuse me, “voluntarily” resigned after being instructed to move to L.A. within a couple of months without being given a cost-of-living increase. And it’s pretty clear that the “A.V. Club as We Know It” isn’t long for this world.
Right, exactly!! I just mean that I appreciate the principle of not doomsaying, because there has been a lot of “the A.V. Club is DONE, this is IT” during my eight-and-a-half-year/about-to-close tenure as a freelancer that I had to roll my eyes at, and I don’t mean to dismiss any future AVC writers sight unread, as it were. But, yeah, there’s a big difference between “some writers I like found another job they were more excited about” and “the editorial core of the site has been actively alienated from their jobs, and are taking most of the good freelancers with them.”
Yeah, I definitely don’t want to rag on any newcomers (too much), who I’m sure will do their best despite being underpaid and instructed to write 300-word newswires which are also somehow slideshows. Not gonna lie, from a commenter’s perspective, the Kinjapocalypse really did deal a death blow to the reader community, but there was always enough fantastic writing over the past few years to keep me coming back. Now? We’ll see, I guess. Thank you as well, by the way—your reviews have always been a great read, and I always appreciated your willingness to mix it up in the comments.
Aw, thank you! As much as I sometimes jokingly shake my fist at the comments section, it’s been such a crazy and still-novel pleasure to discover people actually read stuff I write and say funny or insightful or tangential or even aggrieved stuff about it! I truly loved writing for this site AND reading it AND jumping into the comments and I will miss at all.
(The people who read just the headline and then scroll down to comment, though… not gonna miss that!!!)
I’m hoping that maybe some of you might get in touch with the Defector (old deadspin), if not to join, then at least take a gander at the business model. I shelled out for them, but I was a lot more active here than I ever was on deadspin. I’d bet I’m not the only one.
Yeah, well, I was hoping Defector would get in touch with me when I applied for a staff writer job there a year or so ago, beyond a form-letter rejection, but no such luck!Their model seems great, though, and of course they have tons of great writers. I’d love it if some AVC folks did something similar, though I don’t think I’m in any position to wrangle it in any sense (beyond, you know, begging to be a part of it when someone else does).
IIRC they’re hiring again now?
I got the sense from their total lack of response that I was maybe not the candidate they were looking for, ha. But I do honestly think they should snap up one of the actual AVC staffers!
I understand it’s a big deal. I hope you all find jobs/situations better than what you currently have. I’m likely going to be unceremoniously dismissed before the end of the year as well, and while I’m nervous, I’m also a bit relieved, to be honest. I feel like the frog in the pot of water that is starting to notice the bubbles.
Not to at all downplay the bad experience of losing a job, even one you may not like much, but I will say, I got laid off from my day job during a round of pandemic cutbacks in summer 2020, and while I was angry and frustrated at the time, I think it was absolutely for the best in the long run.
“the editorial core of the site has been actively alienated from their jobs, and are taking most of the good freelancers with them.”Good news, I guess we get to keep Barsanti!
My concerns are already bearing out in the paucity of daily content, and that much of what is posted feels a hell of a lot like clickbaity nonsense. It tells me that either senior management has decided that’s the was it wants these sites (not just AVC – look what’s happening at sister sites as well; two main writers at Jalop, 2 at Root, probably more I don’t know about) to be, or that they want to reconstitute with quality critics but can’t attract talent after the way they treated your batch. I look back at the amount of lengthy features, many recurring, and compare to what is on offer today and it’s increasingly a pale imitation. I always enjoyed your willingness to vigorously mix it up with commenters. I’m sure I speak for a lot of people when I say we’ll be on the lookout for where you guys land.
My feeling has always (well, often) been that the newswire stuff isn’t of much interest to me (even at its best, the assignment tends to be “write up the news these other sites are writing up”), but is a necessary part of most broad-interest entertainment sites’ (flawed) ecosystems and perfectly fine to put up with if it allows good writers and critics some breathing room on the more interesting stuff, which for a long time I’d maintain that it did. But, doesn’t seem like management is willing to hold up their end of the bargain on that anymore. So, I hope new models find their way to the surface. And remain thankful for the outlets I’ve freelanced for that don’t appear to treat their staff so poorly (and, of course, that are good to freelancers, but at AVC, freelancers like me have sometimes been insulated from poor treatment by our remarkable editors).
“but is a necessary part of most broad-interest entertainment sites’ (flawed) ecosystems and perfectly fine to put up with if it allows good writers and critics some breathing room on the more interesting stuff, which for a long time I’d maintain that it did. But, doesn’t seem like management is willing to hold up their end of the bargain on that anymore.”Bingo. And at their best, Newswire pieces commented on or downplayed or riffed on (Big Butt Book!) their subjects in a way that made them interesting on their own, instead of regurgitating the same “news” everyone else has.
I certainly didn’t mean to minimize the experience of both those leaving (who, in a perfect bit of double-speak, were told that the move was not mandatory, though their jobs would be moving) or to the incoming staff, who have to reckon with whatever BS this new regime has in mind…and likely some bad will from those mad over the exodus.I still can’t get my head around this LA relocate. How does being physically in LA useful to writing for a pop-culture site?
The L.A. relocation only makes sense as a thinly veiled pretense for laying off senior staff who, in the new management’s eyes, were getting too expensive to retain, as I think all parties were well aware. Management even posted employees’ “vacant” positions on job sites before said employees had officially responded to their ultimatum.
Man, I’d really love see detailed site statistics pre and post kinja. The place went from what felt like Grand Central Station to a residential bus stop in Queens. As far as managerial blunders go, yeesh.
I keep expecting Dikachu to make a cameo in this comments section. Alas.
Go to the Ringer and give Fennessey a run for his money.
Just finished reading this and … NO, NO I’M NOT … I’VE GOT SOMETHING IN MY EYE!
You probably would have rated it higher if your Mom would have brought the microwaved pizza rolls you requested to you in the basement “apartment”. Just couldn’t help myself. 🙂
Nah, Iron Man 3 is pretty bad. It’s tied for my least favorite MCU film. Granted, I haven’t seen Shang Chi, Eternals, or No Way Home, but I doubt any of them are worse than IM3.
I always thought of the grade of Dowd reviews as the punchline of a shaggy dog story — something sort of connected but ultimately beside the real point, which is the way it all was told along the way.
Hell, I always thought your C+ grade for IM3 was too generous. I’ve rewatched it a few times over the years since it came out, just to make sure I wasn’t missing something. But no, every time I watched it, I felt exactly the same way at the end. It’s as enjoyable as getting hit repeatedly in the face with a garbage bag full of broken glass. The dialog, the plotting, the constant toilet humor, and the hammy Angela Bassett-levels of over-acting, along with more minor annoyances (why doesn’t Tony make his Iron Man suits out of whatever miracle material is used for Pepper’s sports bra? Extremis can melt metal, but it’s stymied by Spandex, apparently.), just made this movie a complete slog. The entire intelligence community can’t figure out who this Mandarin is and where he’s located, but Tony figures it out in a few minutes, then takes out an entire team of trained mercenaries with his Home Depot electrified gardening glove? When did Tony get all that specialized SWAT/SEAL/Ranger training?! And all Tony had to do was get surgery to remove the shrapnel in his chest?! Then what was the point of the entire “I’m dying” plot of IM2?! Such piss-poor writing.At this point, it is the only Marvel movie I just won’t bother watching if I’m ever in the mood for a marathon. I’ll sit through the goddamn Dark Elves of Thor 2 a hundred times before I bother with IM3 again. What a waste of Sir Ben Kingsley’s talents. He went from being a truly terrifying villain to being a farting drunkard, all because Shane Black wanted to pull a Shyamalan twist. But the only thing it did, as you stated in the review, was leave a giant villain hole that was then filled by Guy Pearce, who wasn’t terrifying at all. I’ve never read IM comics, so I didn’t know anything about the Mandarin going into this movie. My critique about that plot twist has nothing to do with “sticking to canon”. It was just dumb writing. Black wrote himself into a corner and the only way out was to plop Pearce in as the “Mandarin”…ugh.The only thing that could make this movie worse is a 4-hour long Zack Snyder cut with Nordic women singing a dirge for no reason…
A few things:- I share your Marvel/superhero fatigue, as do many people now, and you were just a bit ahead of the curve in being grumpy about it, that’s all.- I always felt like the “C+ Dowd” jokes were more affectionate than not. They certainly were from me. My non-tongue-in-cheek take is that it was nice to see a critic today with real standards, who recognizes the competent mediocrity of most current entertainment for what it is. And I’m glad you never tried to appease the loudmouths in the commentariat. You were critical and you were honest. You did your profession proud.
– On that note, you have been one of the bright spots around here for years now—someone with complex, thoughtful opinions, and a good writer. You deserved better than you got from this site, and you will be missed. Best of luck to you.
Yeah I always thought ‘C+ Dowd’ just generally referred to the fact that he’s a tough (but fair!) grader, I didn’t know that it stemmed from this review.
This one was just the poster child for a long roster of C+’s that people gave him shit for. Even when the reviews read favorably he’d them stamp them with the C+. Which, if you’re grading on a curve, is above-average.Which made discussions around anything that didn’t get a grade in the B- to C range very interesting, because that meant it was either very much worth seeing or should be torn to shreds for sport.
I’d rather have a C+ Dowd review of a movie I liked then the crap this site seems to be moving towards. Slides shows and lazy videos about the five best sitcom themes ever that somehow doesn’t mention a sitcom made before 2000. You will be missed and I hope to see you writing for a better outlet soon.
Wait, you’re telling me that that best TV sitcom themes video didn’t include motherfucking Cheers?! What’s even the point?
i appreciate your honest discussion of grade inflation. any movie that got above a B- made me think it might be good. i will miss both your reviews on this platform and the batshit crazy comments flaming you for speaking your opinion on something as subjective as art. or, in the case of Replicas, “art.”
A well end, Dowd.
I always giggled when I would see references to good ol’ C+ C+ Dowd in the comment section, and I admit I would mutter it under my breath whenever you would pan a movie I liked, but I never knew just where it began. This is a great piece. I will miss your writing here, although with pretty much all of my favorite writers also leaving, I don’t know how often I will visit. As for Iron Man 3, I was completely pleasantly surprised when I saw it (after suffering through the disaster that was 2, and possibly also because I read your tepid review of it!) The Mandarin twist was hilarious and perfect, and seeing him pop up again in Shang Chi was delightful. I can’t remember much else about the movie, so it might have earned that C+.
Here’s how much I appreciate Alex’s work:
_He’s my go to film critic since I found this site
_I see no more reason to be visiting this site, as most headlines and articles are groan inducing, and my favorite features and writers are all long gone.
_I will need to finally start using Twitter (shudders) just to read Dowd’s writing.
Thanks for all the years of awesome work, and here’s for many more, just in another place. Cheers
Polemic PS: All superhero films have long become C-/+ films anyway
top 3 mcu movie for me. gonna miss you, dowd.
Truly, Jim Spanfeller is a herb.
I assume there’s data supporting that it’s more profitable to run a set of websites as clickbait content aggregators rather than producing actual, thoughtful commentary, or Giz wouldn’t be doing this. Doesn’t mean we have to like it.
Eh, never underestimate the ability of rich assholes to follow their own whims at the expense of their own self-interest.
True, but these particular assholes report to a private equity group that does not respond well to seeing the value of its holdings diminished by those whims. I can only assume the ad revenue is better from numerous quick-hit clicks than people spending 10 minutes reading a feature and commenting on it multiple times.
Unfortunately true. I feel like during the switch to Kinja when everyone was saying how this would kill the community, someone on the tech side explicitly told us “you guys represent like, 2% of the site’s traffic.”
that was also during the rosy days of inflated facebook numbers.
I remember that. The bluntness of the comment was frankly impressive.
I can’t find the article but after The Dissolve died Carles (Hipster Runoff) wrote a post-mortem in (I think) Motherboard. Essentially unless you’re WSJ or NYT, you can’t survive on display advertising as a boutique site anymore; everything had to scale to content aggregation volume to get clicks (backed up with sponsored content). Add that to VC pressure to maximize revenue and you’re not going to see any mid-tier sites (just like movies!). It’s why every writer with a brand is moving to subscription models. It’s a good, depressing article.
I’m not surprised. Given what most formats and content seems to be these days I assumed that approach was the most profitable.
Well, I definitely wasn’t expecting this to make me tear up, yet here we are.Jesus Christing GOD, but I am going to miss this place, even now that it’s become a shambling zombie version of what it once was. I’ve been coming here for 20 goddamn years, and while the decline has been long and slow, it’s almost literally muscle memory for me to check in every morning and afternoon to see what’s what in the world of pop culture. Thanks for being here, Alex. And same goes for all the Old Guard 2.0 that will soon be vacating these shores. Best of luck to all of you.
Muscle memory is a good way to put it. Which makes it even more depressing when you pop it open and it’s still the same stories from the previous afternoon.
What, the latest revelations of the Will Ferrell/Adam McKay Beef Scandal of the Century can’t sustain you for a good 24 hours?
Considering I’m working my way through Succession and see their names together in the credits every episode as exec producers, it’s hard for me to take that “beef” too seriously.
Curious what you thought about Iron Man 2 originally. Saw it again recently and I think I can safely say that it’s second only to The Eternals as worst MCU movie. I should probably reevaluate those first two Thor movies because I remember those being pretty terrible as well.
Haven’t watched the second film since it I caught the opening-night midnight. So maybe it, too, is better than I remember. But without the revisit: Yeah, worst movie of the MCU, for sure.
I have to agree with your criticisms of IM3: plotting, action, CGI, etc. But then again, I’m on on record as someone who genuinely likes IM2.
Ditto. I have a list of reasons for liking IM2, while I have a larger list of reasons for not liking IM3 (I’m admittedly a sucker for seeing RDJ in the early practical Iron Man suits/harness). I’ve rewatched both movies too and the pros and cons are still there.
There are SO many worse movies in the MCU than Iron Man 2. (which, don’t get me wrong, is not actually good, but neither the catastrophe many make it out to be.)
Honestly, I don’t think it would have half the reputation it has if they’d just taken out the “peeing in the suit” scene.
They either needed to cut that scene, or lean in to it hard. Have an actual shot of Downey’s limp penis dribbling urine.
That would certainly have appealed to a certain demographic!
IM2 at least had that racetrack sequence at the beginning. Whereas all, say, Thor 2 had was…ummmm…I think his mom dies in that one?
IM2 also had Sam Rockwell AND Sam Rockwell dancing, which on its own almost guarantees an A grade.
I like the teleporting shenanigans at the end of ‘Thor 2′.
Iron Man 2 is goofy; Thor 2 is boring. It feels like a lot of people have more of a problem with the former, but I think that should be flipped around. I can remember multiple Whiplash scenes, and while many of them are not great, I’m having trouble even picturing what Malekith looked like. Thor 2 getting middling reviews seems like the end result of the “most movies are fine” grading philosophy detailed here that seems like the AV Club’s house style. It has no grievous technical errors, the plot is coherent, and many of the actors do their jobs competently. It’s just so dull that you can watch it multiple times and remember almost nothing about it, and most people who revisit it do so only out of pseudo-obligation as part of a universe-wide rewatch.
If you let that kind of movie hang out in the D-F range, I think you’d find that there’s actually a pretty noticeable spectrum of quality in the average week’s releases.
Yeah…I won’t go to bat for IM2 as a good movie (not that I think that’s what you are doing here), but it’s got Mickey Rourke saying “Hey, where’s my bird?” in a terrible Russian accent and Sam Rockwell tap dancing or some shit, so it’s got redeeming qualities.
Of course this is someone who thinks Chris Evans and Captain America is boring, so my opinion is pretty much garbage.
Yeah, I’m always surprised at the hate Iron Man 2 gets. To be fair, it’s been a while, but I recall it hanging together pretty well (possible on sheet Downey charm alone, but still). I think Thor: Dark World still holds the low water mark for it’s sheer unmemorability.
It’s gotta be in the bottom 3 of the MCU. While other movies in the franchise have had their flaws, Iron Man 2 seems the most “proactively bad”.
I watched it recently for the first time in a decade and it’s…it’s the worst one. I was around 14 the last time I saw it and WOW did I not clock how relentlessly gross that movie is towards all of it’s female characters. It’s pervasive. Also the movie’s boring or whatever, but I expected that going in.
I used to think this but in retrospect its not worse than Thor 2
Hulk is also a real stinker and deserves to be on that short list…
Talking about a top 7 MCU movie in Eternals, and skipping over CA:CW when it is right there as the worst is one way to go about it.
Top 7 isnt exactly rarefied air, and even then…. it isnt top 7.
Thor 1 is a great early solo film. A fun fish-out-water story and Shakespearean drama.
The first Thor movie has some charm to it. It feels more like a rom-com and surprisingly low budget compared to Marvel’s other films.
I don’t know about Shakespearean but I’ve revisited fairly recently and it is a good fun movie, maybe the best new hero introduction movie other than the first Captain America
Iron Man 2 is the Limp Bizkit poster on my wall of Marvel movies.
Iron Man 2, Thor 2, and Incredible Hulk are bottom 3. None are outright bad though.
It’s clear Favreau’s heart wasn’t in it. He’s obviously much happier (no pun intended) in the Marvel world as a supporting character that pops up every couple of years.
I feel like you sorta have to grade IM2 on a curve. Was it a good movie? Absolutely not. Was there any chance that it was going to be a good movie given that it was filmed while the WGA was pencils-down on strike? Also absolutely not. Did they manage to wring something that was at least recognizable as a movie out of the rough drafts they were filming from? …kinda? If nothing else you have to credit everyone involved for making the best out of the shit sandwich they’d been handed.
Were the WGA on strike when Iron Man 2 was made? I’m not being snarky, it’s just the big strike from that era (that I know of) was 2007 into 2008 (ending in February 2008) – and Justin Theroux didn’t start writing the script until after the first film was released in May 2008.
Huh, apparently I was misremembering. IM2 did go into production without a finished screenplay, but it was apparently due to just garden-variety production chaos, not the strike: https://collider.com/iron-man-2-filming-problems-explained/
That makes sense. I seem to remember Iron Man started filming without a finished script either and that turned out great (thanks mostly to RDJ’s inprovs) so I can see them thinking it wouldn’t be an issue here either.
I had done a rewatch of the MCU recently, most of the films I had only seen once at release, and I personally think the first two Thor films are towards the bottom of the franchise, but have a lot more merit than Iron Man 2 & 3. Thor has all the character that actors like Hiddleston, Dennings, Hopkins, and Skarsgård brought (though less so with The Dark World). Their stories are structured better too, imho. Iron Man 2 has always bothered me with the ridiculous mess of conflicts, abrupt changes in settings, and that stupid Elon Musk cameo; Shane Black’s Iron Man 3 is definitely better than in memory as Dowd mentioned, and probably decently better than Thor 2, but I think Thor gives it a run for it’s money.
I’ll always love the first Thor movie. It’s funny when it wants to be and to me is the most efficient movie Marvel’s ever made (under two hours!).Also, Iron Man 3 is absolutely a C+ movie.
Truth and Preach. It’s the Worst since it has an Elon Musk cameo at the Race Track (IM 2). Eww.
I’m surprised, Eternals was not an amazing movie, but IMO, it doesn’t even belong in the bottom half of Marvel movies. So, its surprising to me that it got such bad reviews and people are considering it the worst Marvel movie. When there was Iron Man 2 and 3, and Thor 1 and 2 and Captain Marvel. Those are way way worse than Eternals. I considered Eternals to be quite serviceable.
Worse than Thor 2 or The Incredible Hulk? Not sure I can agree with you on that…
Wait–where does The Incredible Hulk fit into this?
Farewell, Mr. Dowd! When the old guard all left the AV Club and started The Dissolve, I felt like I would stop coming here. But then the film writing stayed at the same high quality. That probably won’t happen this time.
What’s happened to the AV Club is so sad, and I really hope you and all the other talented writers leaving find your feet and keep writing great articles like this elsewhere. I appreciated the lack of A’s because, as you said, if a film got an AA Dowd ‘A’ (or even a B+), I knew it was worth looking out for.
“Borderline incoherent,” to quote my review, was definitely overstating the point—it’s rare that you can’t track who’s fire- or laser-blasting whom in this film”So being able to tell who is laser-blasting whom somehow makes the action “borderline incoherent?”Or is this part of that “no proofing needed, it’s fine” part of Dowd’s reviews that I’ll miss when I stop coming to the AV Club?I hope Dowd lands a better gig or two – these folks deserve (and deserved) better.
No, he’s stating that he was wrong to call it borderline incoherent, because you could at least follow the action.
Thanks for the memories, A.A. Dowd. The film section was the only thing that kept me coming to the site.
Doing this job has only strengthened my conviction that most movies are neither great nor terrible but somewhere in between—you know, which is what the C+ fundamentally signifies.At the heart of it, I think this is where the disagreements lie.
At my work, around 10 years ago, a system was implemented to track progress in projects, and they were given a green, yellow, or red indication. Green is everything is on track, yellow is that there was a change to the plan but it has a plan, and red means there’s no accurate plan. People threw a god damn fit because of that yellow signifier. Everyone assumed yellow was a caution; a warning; a mark to be used against us come review time. It took a year for people to accept it.
The C+ is like that. To the reviewer, it means an average score. Not great, but not awful. I’d say to a reader, or really anyone who’s gone through school, a C+ is low. It’s a warning that you’re off track, whereas a B- would be an average score. Again, this is my personal opinion, but I think the backlash against those C+ scores is that we all had different opinions on what “average” is. This site (at least a decade ago) made it a point to say that the grades don’t matter; read the review to understand the true opinion of the author. Your piece didn’t come off like a scathing review, but the C+ was still interpreted as below average.
That’s a good point. If you see a 6.1/10 on IMDB, it’s likely an average, meh film. If you get a 61/100 on your science test, you’re looking at an explanation to your parents and summer school.
i think that’s sometimes why people take review scores so personally. they still have that chip on their shoulder of a teacher making them feel bad.
Funnily enough, in college, depending on the subject a 61 could be an amazing score.
If I see a 61% on Metacritic or Rotten Tomatoes, that makes me think “average”.If I see 6.1 on IMDb, that makes me think of possible alternative viewing.
Great point. And weirdly, one I think all critics understand at the low end of the scale. I don’t think I’ve seen Dowd or anyone else give a movie a D-grade saying the film was simply below average, within a few tweaks of being an okay film. If your film gets a D-grade, you’re being told it’s a failure. An actual failing grade is given out so seldom (I haven’t counted, but it has to be much rarer than A-grades around here) that it’s very hard to see a C as a movie that’s being recommended as being average (“You’ll have an okay time!”).
It’s not Dowd’s fault that helicopter parenting and the self esteem movement have completely changed the meaning/trajectory of letter grades in K-12 and undergraduate education.
Hey folks. I just wanted to drop in and say thank you to everyone here for all the kind words, and also for reading what I’ve written at The A.V. Club these past nine years. I know I wasn’t always the most consistent presence in the comments, even before the Kinja transition, but I dipped in fairly regularly, and for every person who spent that time calling me a joyless blowhard (again, not *entirely* unfair) there were many more who seriously engaged with what I wrote or just with the movie in question. Y’all helped me become a better writer, I think—if you’re going to criticize other people’s work for a living, you should be able to take some constructive criticism, too. At the very least, I think I largely shook my habit of drive-by dissing other movies in the middle of a review! (Message received on that quirk, everyone.) In any case, thank you all again for reading and for your passion. It means a lot.
you did great work. i appreciate it.
If people didn’t value your opinions they wouldn’t have given you as much grief as they did. There’s nothing wrong with expecting a movie out of a universe as controlled and cultivated as Marvel to stand on its own as a work of art. Writing that it delivers what it is expected to deliver as part of that universe, no more, no less, in my book merits a C+ (especially under your definition). Anyone looking for affirmation can go to RT and read 50 fresh reviews. That’s not what AV Club readers are after.
Thank you for everything. Here’s hoping you and the rest find outlets that truly appreciate your talents. Just gave you a follow on Twitter and will happily follow you wherever you land.P.S. Sorry for making fun of your hair that one time.
I think we can let the…production values… of the Dowd/IV videos alone for now. But c’mon guys, at least brush it! Okay, that’s all. Sorry.
I’ve really enjoyed your work here and will follow you wherever you go next; I think I’m not the only one who wants to encourage you and other former AVC staffers who are leaving in the current profit mandated exodus to start a substack or something. I’d kick in $5/month or something to read stuff by you and the old crew. Or, hell, just you :). Your curmudgeonly writing is exactly what keeps me coming back. As you say, if you sing something’s praises, it’s probably really worth it!
Yeah, start a pop culture Substack or something.
Dissolve Two: Electric Boogaloo (seriously though that style would play alot better now than when it first launched)
I’ll miss you and I love your work! The entire ethos behind you approach as you described above is what I valued most about your reviews. Movies reviewed as they stand on their own, not apples reviewed for people who only love apples.
Sad to see you go, and sad to see the condition of this once great site. Even though I tend to read your (and really any) reviews with a grain of salt, I always appreciated your strict adherence to reviewing a film as a film on its own merits, asking it to be best it could be and criticizing where it fell short. As for your grades, I would mentally bump them all up a half point, so this one would have been a B-, which is still a little harsh, but warranted. I didn’t particularly like it, but for the opposite reasons you list – it abandons the Marvel Superhero movie feel too much, becoming during the final stretch just another late 80’s “assault the bad guys oil refinery” action movie thing. It’s done well, better than the movies it’s homaging, and Downey Jr. seems to be enjoying himself and fits right in there, but it simply doesn’t seem like something Tony Stark would find himself doing. And then in the end it turns into the weightless cgi robot drones thing that infested all the Marvel movies at the time. By now they have reached autopilot status, critic proof, guaranteed audience pleasers. Even if they try something new and fail, they’re all pretty much the same. But the sameness is competently directed, expertly acted, entertaining action movies with more characterization than *almost* anything starring Arnold or Sly or Bruce that my friends dragged me to in my teens. Anyway, best of luck in your future endeavors, I’ll keep an eye. eye. out for your byline!
Thank you, Dowd. I’ve always enjoyed your reviews and will miss seeing them here.
I once begrudged your middling reviews and I sought to wonder why. I thought, “What’s this guy’s deal?”, “Is there nothing he likes?”, “Is he a little pretentious?” and so I ultimately wondered “What kind of movie actually affords an A from this guy?”
I had scour through about 2 years of reviews to find about 10 films or so that received A or A- ratings. You know what I found?
I found hard biting, Auteur-driven, and really creative flicks. I found films like A Marriage Story, Parasite, Climax, Moonlight, If Beale Street Could Talk, amongst other films that are going to survive and encapsulate film culture of the 2010s. I found out that when that film gets an A, that film really has a vision fused into its DNA to what it’s trying to do or say. So upon reviewing my “AAAAAAAAA.A. Dowd Top 10 List” I found out that what it takes to make a truly great film is nothing short of a fucking miracle. So, you know what? I get it and I appreciate that the bar is set really high. ‘Cause tickets are like $15 a pop and I don’t want to waste that kind of money on really dumb shit that lets me down.
I HAVE ENJOYED YOUR WORK AND LOOK FORWARD TO SEEING YOU SOON.
NOT IN MY PROFESSIONAL CAPACITY, I SHOULD ADD.
I’ll always appreciate your film writing. Even when I disagree with your opinions, I can’t deny that you’ve given every film you watch a fair shot, and you bring the same critical, analytical eye to every movie. “C+” will always be a fun gag to me, but as far as I’m concerned, your writing deserves an A, and any outlet would be lucky to have you.
You and the Chicago staff were the last vestiges of this site’s ethos. Incredibly sad to see you go, but will eagerly look forward to whatever writing you publish next!
Bravo, sir. Can’t wait to read what you do next.
Thanks for all your years of film criticism here, Alex!Your reviews and those At the Movies-style video discussions with other AV Club critics were always a pleasure to read and watch. I didn’t always agree with your takes, but you offered knowledgeable, serious and interesting perspectives on almost every film you covered. A Double-A Dowd review was not to be dismissed.Good luck to you!
I’m going to miss you. Concur with others … you did great work here. Best of luck going forward.
I will dearly miss you, Dowd, and eagerly await your next move.
Thanks for all your great work over the last (holy shit) nine years, not just on the reviews but in features like Palme Thursday and in the overall movie writing on the site. Even after the AV Club lost a lot of its big voices, this was a place to find good writing on stuff that wasn’t tied to the hyped release of the day, it was great to see cool and unique work but also to see that the ethos of the site was continuing. Keep being critical wherever you go next.
Catch you down the road A.A.!
We’re gonna miss you, and as someone who’ll be taking it off my RSS reader (remember those?) once the last of the old guard are gone, I’m gonna miss this place.Y’all should pitch the Defector Media collective on a “Theatre Club”.
It’s not gonna be the same without you. When a lot of the old guard left, you were one of the ones who convinced me that the site still had a future. Good luck with wherever things take you in the future!
I’ve probably thrown more than my share of our patented rapid-fire anti-wit at you over the years, Mr Dowd, but it didn’t take long before your reviews became one of the features I most looked forward to on the AV Club. And not just to crack yet another C+ joke, but more and more because the quality of your film analysis has deepened my appreciation of movies over the years. If you were hard on a poor little Marvel movie now and then, it wasn’t out of spite, but out of an appreciation for what movies could be but frequently aren’t. We’ll miss you, brother. Keep writing, and we’ll keep reading.
Thanks for all the reviews, and for this piece, which is an excellent way to look back and say goodbye (regardless of how The Batman turns out—I’m hoping for a high note, but you never know). And sorry for being one of the ones who took a while to adapt when you first came on. I have a friend who’s a baseball writer who whenever he has to talk about a series between two teams and pick a winner, he throws in the disclaimer “The least important words of this article are the ones at the end” where he picks a winner and predicts how many games the series will go–which for most writers is the stuff that’s in bold face that the reader skips to before reading anything else. Once I learned to treat the letter grade as just one of many letters in your review—and not the most important one I had to look at first—I appreciated your work more. It’s a habit that’s carried over to my reading of criticism overall, and I think it’s made me a better reader. So thanks for that, too.
It sucks that I’m not a weirdo billionaire because it would be really cool if someone could fund a site with the people forced out and have them just be able to go all out and do what they want. I’ve grown to look forward to these bylines and it would be nice to see them in one place so I don’t have to hunt around.
Count me among those who appreciated your hard-nosed takes. It meant that I always knew that it meant something really special when you gave a film an A (or even an A-). Best of luck.
For what it’s worth, I think your reviews and letter grades are (almost) always spot on! Although I certainly received a lot of negative feedback for employing what some saw as a similarly stingy grading philosophy when it came to university students’ research papers. Not a great way to win friends and influence people, can confirm.
Thanks for all of your reviews!
I’ve been reading the AV Club since it was just in print (e.g., “Justify Your Existence”) and haven’t logged in in a while. I’m logging in to say that I loved your reviews and your stewardship of the film section in the wake of the exodus. I’ll read your reviews wherever they go, even a substack called C+ C+ Dowd.
Reading the AV Club when it was in print? What a Pathetic Geek Story!
Passersby Were Amazed by the Unusually Large Amounts of Blood.
Ah, those were the days.
passersby were amazed by the unusually large amounts of blood
Thank you for such amazing work, I’ll be following you wherever you end up next.
And thanks for being so upfront about what Kinja has done to this place. Thankfully, we still had your reviews.
Thanks for everything, Mr Dowd. I think it’s the movie reviews I’ll miss the most.
I’ve finally taken the AV Club out of my daily rotation after… way too many years, but I’m glad I did check it today. I was, probably, among the people that made those jokes nine years ago but I’ve always appreciated your writing and your standards for movies. Good luck! May I happen upon your reviews some other day.
I’d like to join the chorus and thank you for all the work you have done here, as a writer, but also as an editor. You have assembled a great team here (or multiple ones, to be honest), which is work that is less visible, but equally important.Also, I’d like to thank you for all the non-movie things you have covered. I honestly think that your later-days game reviews were among the best, if not the best, still written at the time on the site. And your article on Weezer was just breathing the kind of mad love that has been felt less and less on the site.I can’t wait to see what your Twitter handle will say soon — read you elsewhere!
I might have disagreed with a lot of your ratings , but I always enjoyed your writing! Good luck out there!
You did a great job. People can quibble over the letter grades, but I always saw your reviews as trustworthy and of good reliable quality. Best of luck for the future and I hope you find a good home after this!
You are a relic from another, better era. Good luck A.A. Dowd.“May the D+ carry you always.”
Yeah, sorry I hated on you because you gave Rampage a B. You’ve definitely been my fave reviewer here since AVClub got kinja’d.But, really, Rampage? B? /sigh
MOS is a C+ or C to me (I know people hate it but it was fine to me)Iron Man 2 is a C or C- to me, I couldn’t stand it and it was a lazy follow up to a great Iron Man Origin movie.I like Iron Man 3 at the time more than most but it is still a middle of the road Marvel movie. So C+ is harsh but it really isn’t better than a B or B – so you aren’t that far off.
If nothing else, Iron Man 3 should be lauded for Downey’s performance being one of the most realistic portrayals of post traumatic stress in film.
I have not rewatched Iron Man 3, but just based off my memory I would have said a C+ was too generous.
Sorry to see this website fall so hard. Also, Iron Man 3 is one of the few MCU things I actually rewatch because the twist is delightful and it’s a really solid Shane Black Xmas movie.
Eh, opinions are like assholes, right? Everyone’s got one and they itch at the most inopportune times. Star Trek Into Darkness sure didn’t deserve a B (any more than J.J. Abrams deserved a crack at another big space opera franchise), but Shane Black is someone who can come up with some great individual bits (see his script doctoring for the original Predator) but falls down when trying to come up with a coherent plot (see his The Predator, where the plot hinges on the men in black imprisoning the title alien killer in a big open room where everyone’s working and the Predator is restrained by laughably flimsy metal straps). In IM3, yes, it’s neat to see Tony working without the armor, but then we get to the bit near the end where he summons a couple dozen spare suits of armor by remote control, and even though I’ve been informed (on this site, I think) that there was some plot reason why he couldn’t do so before, it’s still terribly bogus–about as flimsy as those straps holding the Predator down.
I’ll add that the attack on Tony’s house was very well done. It’s a direct consequence of Tony’s brash behavior, and it requires him to be very smart and judicious about his use of the armor to get him and Pepper out of the situation alive. Very well scripted and edited, and was an action-y setpiece that didn’t rely on a hero punching people, which is always nice to see.
Having a critic on this site who has always been willing to call something as he sees it has been too good to last. Now that everything is ground breaking, game changing, superb, revelatory, iconic, and classic, it is damn near impossible to accurately gauge what I want to give my time to. You will be missed Dowd. I may still click on AV Club out of habit, but I won’t be sticking around very long from this day forward.
I can’t disagree with a C+, really. If there were something between a B- and a C+, maybe I’d give it that. I also thought the movie wasn’t “Shane Black” enough, and could have use more of his brand of buddy comedy between Stark and Rhodey.I guess I’ll be googling to see where my favorite AV Club writers end up, after this ill-conceived “force everyone to week in L.A.” bit plays out. Bon chance!
But is it a Christmas movie???
at least in the days before Kinja decimated the site’s robust commenting cultureAn assassin with words turning on his masters, it’s a twist fit for a Marvel movie.As AA reminisces, so do I, about my own history as an AV Club Reader. I started visiting regularly around maybe 2010-ish, when I had a friend on Facebook who kept relaying jokes from the TNG reviews written by Zack Handlen, which I found hilarious. But it was a while longer before I really started engaging in the comments, which were a bit intimidating for a newcomer. By the time Kinja came, I felt like I had only just barely gotten a grip on all the in-jokes (there were some that I only pretended to understand, based on context clues). And “decimated” is absolutely the right word. Things were never the same again after the Kinja bomb ripped through the community. And if it’s even possible, Kinja actually got worse over time.AA’s departure also marks my own departure as an AV club reader. It’s the last straw that breaks the camel’s back, after so many of my other favourite writers have already left. If 90% of the posts are lazily recycled from Hollywood Reporter and Deadline, then I can simply visit those websites instead. I do really hope that some of the AV Clubs alumns can find a new home that cultivates a similarly vibrant commenting community as the good old days. Disqus still exists, you need merely use it. I’d pay a subscription fee in a heartbeat in order to remove the incentive for all the clickbait crap that clutters the modern AV Club’s front page.
I want to say I first started reading in the mid-2000s. I didn’t comment for a while because you’re spot-on that at that point in history you better come prepared because that was an educated crowd. I learned massive amounts about music and movies from other commenters, things I’d never heard of that are amazing. I think most people had the same experience.
ditto
started reading in 1998 when it was theonion.com/avclub.
Me too, alongside the print version. No joke that wasting time posting on AVC got me through grad school. Now it’s like watching a parent die
I remember that URL, and being confused for several minutes about why none of the articles were jokes. I’m still not sure I quite understand the genesis of the Satirical News/Genuine Media Analysis, other than “nerds gonna nerd.”
I started visiting regularly around maybe 2010-ish, when I had a friend on Facebook who kept relaying jokes from the TNG reviews written by Zack HandlenThose TNG/DS9 comment threads were something else. Pour one out for Rappin Jake Sisko and Frakes.
And if it’s even possible, Kinja actually got worse over time.
I still can’t figure if it’s active sabotage, or just massive incompetence. On the active sabotage side, I remember telling another commenter on July 8 last year that she could get her comments approved by having a friend who was approved go into her profile and approve comments from there. That capability disappeared a week later. Before then, I didn’t believe the purposeful sabotage theories, now I don’t know. Everything they have done in the last year with the software seems to have been done with the express purpose of driving away commenters. I just don’t see what the business sense of it is.
So I may have the chronology wrong but I’m going to try to chime in here. The original sin of the Kinja debacle started with the whole Peter Thiel/Hulk Hogan destroying Gawker Media sites thing. Kinja was originally developed for Gawker as part of some weird idea Nick Denton had to develop a social network or some kind of whistelblowing platform out of his commenting section. It was always very hard to use and weird.
When Denton was forced to sell all the Gawker Media sites to meet the terms of the lawsuit as the only possible way to keep them going (which of course didn’t work for Gawker itself) the first buyer was something called Fusion. Fusion already owned or soon purchased other sites including the Onion/Clickhole itself and the AV Club as well as the Root. For some reason all of the sites had to adopt the same general design/look/user experienceFor awhile AV Club was allowed to continue its Disqus based commenting system (which was already its second commenting platform) but then at some point all of the Fusion sites were required to migrate to Kinja. I guess because the Gawker sites had Kinja and they were the majority. This led to what I think some mean by “Kinjapocalypse”. There was a way to change your DisqUs account to a Kinja account but it was very difficult and there were all types of glitches. This understandably turned off a lot of people. The bigger problem though is that Kinja was designed for something else and not for the kind of robust commenting which AV Club readers enjoy.However! in my opinion this is not even when things got really bad. For the first couple years there were still a lot of good comments and the UI though not ideal was something I could live with. Where things got really bad was with the sale of the Fusion sites to G/O media and its notoriously idiotic and greedy CEO Jim Spanfeller. Kinja stopped being maintained entirely and there were more and more glitches and problems and literally no one to complain to which of course drove down the number of comments. On top of that the site seems to be moving away from tv episode recaps, think pieces etc. that would invite comments towards more clickbait
I replied to Jesse that I hope that he and some of the other writers meet up with the Defector (nee’ deadspin)writers, if not to join, at least take a look at the business model.
It’s baffling how much Kinja seems to actively hate its users.
I grew up in Madison, birthplace of The Onion, so it was always readily available around town in the 1990s. Taking the print copy to lunch every week through out college was my routine, and the AV Club eventually became the main attraction. I started reading the online version in the mid-2000s when I moved and the print version became harder to find, and the commentariat practically became the main attraction. The Kinjapocalypse was a bummer for how it thinned out that wonderful, witty community, but I couldn’t have imagined how quickly the once mighty and insightful AV Club Features were replaced by rehashing last night’s Late Show. And now it’s off to LA to die forever.
RIP AV ClubCause of Death: CancerAIDS
Of all the “formula” Marvel films Dowd was actually wrong about, *this” is the one that gets a correction??? Hilariously random.
You read WHY this one, right?
Farewell, Dowd. I always respected your reviews. May the next movie you see warrant an A rating.
The one thing I didn’t see anyone mention was that this movie pulls off the near-impossible task of having a kid sidekick who wasn’t a quip machine or an insufferable brat, but actually felt like a real kid. The scenes with him and Downey were some of the best parts of the movie. Also, Pepper should have gotten her own suit so they could be a battle couple.Now The Last Boy Scout, that was a bad movie.
Last Boy Scout isn’t so bad. Bruce giving it 100% can carry a lot of weight.Been a long time since those days, though.
No one cares. You’re a fucking loser.
C+ is correct for IM3. But not for Man of Steel, that belongs in the sub-basement below F.
I watched IM3 in the theater and to this day it’s one of the only Marvel movies that I’ve never re-watched (Thor 2 is obviously one of the others.) I wonder if a second viewing now would end with me having a change of heart on it as well.
Hey buddy on your way out can you lift me back out of the Greys? I was for like 3 years and then suddenly found myself grey again 3 weeks ago.
No, you weren’t. That is the most overrated movie in the MCU
First off, I enjoyed the reviews even if I did not always agree with them. Mostly, they did seem a bit harsh. Regardless, good luck in your next endeavor.As for IM3 specifically, there is a lot of 80s action movie DNA in that one which worked for me. Even the airplane scene was done with a number of practical effects (the AF1 crew was played by a professional skydiving team). The real letdown was the climax with the drones – too dark and too kinetic to really see anything.
C+ is the right grade; perhaps even a tad generous. If someone just noticed that mainstream films were “shiny, zippy, quality controlled product” for the most part in the middle of the MCU age that says more about their nostalgia for the films of their youth than it does anything else.
Ironically, looking back at Iron Man 3, I think I was too kind, and I’d probably give it a C+ today. Dowd got it right the first time. I too, liked the focus on Tony without the suit, and I think the action is solid. But the film was clunkier than I remember, I wasn’t a fan of the kid, and because the Mandarin twist results in a weaker villain- and thus a weaker climax (Guy Pearce just gets embarassing)- I can say it was a cute idea, that simply does not work. Pro tip: Twists that make your movie weaker, probably aren’t good twists. And I’m coming at it as someone who didn’t care about Mandarin because I didn’t read Iron Man. Just looking at it as a movie. I’m not going to get into the “It’s cool because it made people mad” thing, not only because that is kind of an asshole-ish view to have about why adaptations should do certain things, but its this very attitude from both sides on all sorts of subjects, that has brought about the ‘culture war’ we’re dealing with today.Anyway, Dowd was the best reviewer here. I valued his higher standards, and appreciated his grading philosophy (since I share it completely- I still think AVClub hands out way too many A’s on average). I wish him the best.
I remember discussing that review with Scrawler, Dikachu, Emily VanDerWerff, and a few others over a scotch shortly after it came out. The last time I saw any of them in person, I believe. Could it really have been nine years ago?
Excellent piece. You’ll definitely be missed on this site and made it better.But you were also right the first time; Iron Man 3 is a C+
I love the Marvel movies, and I guess I’m kind of a fanboy. But C+ seems accurate?
quipped that I had only the two As in my pen name to spare. “C+ C+ Dowd,Lol. That’s pretty funny. You’re a good sport
“But I do think one of the defining tensions of my line of work this past
decade has been the increasing demand that critics mirror back
audiences’ affection for these gargantuan spandex spectacles—or else!”Is this any different than it has always been, though? I mean, the spandex part is, but haven’t audiences always been down on critics for not mirroring their own preferences back at them?That said, I’ll miss your reviews here, and will follow you where you end up.
One of the better depictions of anxiety and attendant attacks too
Hey – as the ship finally sinks, let’s borrow a thing and Remember Some Guys™️Keith PhippsTasha RobinsonNathan RabinJosh ModellNoel MurrayScott TobiasSean fuckin O’NealEmily VanderwerffSteven HydenGenevieve KoskiAdd some more folks. Help us all remember some stuff.RIP AVC
The only thing that makes Ben Kingsley’s fake out in Iron Man 3 even remotely acceptable is Shang-Chi.
IM3 was in no way perfect, but it is still lightyears better than IM2. Whiplash was laughably bad.Plus, as you mentioned, IM3 gave us Trevor Slattery, a.k.a. Mandarin. He was the best part of Shang Chi.
For me, Iron Man 3 is the very definition of a C+ movie – it’s not outright bad but it’s not good either. And the Mandarin twist created so many consistency issues in the MCU: if Killian created the Mandarin just to get revenge at Stark, then who was the Ten Rings organization who had Stark at their mercy but never asked him for the Extremis cure? There was a retcon in Shang-Chi but I didn’t like it as much as other people did.But the worst part is how the movie loses steam the minute the Mandarin turned into a joke. Guy Pearce is a solid actor but this isn’t is best performance, and Ben Kingsley (who was in fine form here) is a much more threatening presence. The final fight with all the empty suits is one of the very worst endings of the MCU.
I think the C+ is deserved. To think that the writers turned The Mandarin into a throw away character in favor of an angry nerd for the antagonist…
We are going to miss you. Best of luck in all your endeavors.
To be fair I think you’re forgetting the climate of the time for the film.It was a time period when we weren’t sure if Robert Downey Junior was even coming back and he was wagering for a higher payrate.We then had good friends come together and make a film which ends with Tony not actually being Iron Man at all. Wraps up perfectly with a credits scene that’s an homage to the franchise so far.The problem with Iron Man 3 is that it wasn’t written ti be an MCU film. It was written as a pay I’m done pay me more money film
Mr. Dowd, What is a pre-1960 film that’s GUARANTEED to be in your top 10 favorite films of all time???
How much of the re-evaluation is in light of what subsequent Marvel movies have become? That of course is a biased question because I have gotten sick of the Marvel universe (at least the Avengers Marvel universe).
Popping out of Kinja retirement to say good luck out there, and thanks for all the years of thoughtful reviews.I still think Iron Man 3 is a C+ at best though.
Please don’t be hard on yourself. I mean… yeah, Iron Man 3 deserves far better than those harsh criticisms.But you know what? Your grades on those other movies are pretty spot on. Star Trek Into Darkness is deservedly a B, even though I do really enjoyed the movie. Elysium? Yep, deserved that C+. So did Man of Steel.At least you didn’t hit into infamy that’s IGN for having “Too much water” in its review. That’s worth something!It’s also just a great, funny twist—and all the better for how much it pissed off some Marvel fans.
And in the end, managed to give us a far better Mandarin from Shang-Chi.So we’re all winners in my book!
I was a bit more active commenting in the pre-Kinja days, but never prolific. I confess over the last near decade, I paid a bit more attention to your reviews, and would snicker to myself at every C. I’ve joked to friends that you’re the most accurate movie reviewer out there, if you add two letters. But the truth is, your grading system aside, you never spoiled me and I usually had a great idea of whether I would like a movie or not from your review. Sure, sometimes that was “Dowd had the usual complaints, so I’ll probably like it,” but just as often it was “Dowd called this out as a mess” or “Dowd gave it a B+ and I was already excited so this is going to be AMAZING.”You’re idiosyncratic, and I’ve appreciated that. Reading your reviews was like getting a review from a friend whose opinions I understood and respected even when we disagreed. Thanks for the work and the thoughtful writing, and I hope to C more from you in your next journey.
I still don’t like the fact that they never did anything with the child actor in IM3 in future movies. I remember reading an article that said he was signed for multiples films but he just completely disappeared from the franchise. A one note wasted character.
IM3 might sneak into regular B territory if you include the One Shot with Kingsley, Scoot McNairy, and Sam Rockwell’s intimation of a casual prison-sex lifestyle for Justin Hammer. It ties the Iron Man Trilogy together!
It’s been a pleasure reading your reviews, sir. They always hit the right balance of cleverness, insight and flow, and your A grades really did make me sit up and notice. And I hope you keep your high standards. People have been misunderstanding what critics do since probably the Lumiere brothers, so let them choke on a C+ or two.
Nut up Dowd. C+ was right back then, and right now. Stand by your guns.
As someone who jokingly calls themselves an “Iron Man Hipster” (Was my favorite character before the movies ever existed), I really like the first two movies, but I do not like Iron Man 3. And looking back, it’s even worse off in comparison to later MCU films in how it doesn’t seem to fit very well into everything. But I also hate for the fact it used the “Extremis” storyline from the comics… And ruined it completely.
Despite the terrible reviews Iron Man 2 gets, as a fan of “Iron Man” it had some good stuff and it fit the MCU better. It introduced what he could do for The Avengers a lot more by having him fight in the armor at 100% and not be nerfed at all. IM3 took a story idea that they half assed in translating, added an international villian who kidnap’s the President of the US (where was Cap in this?), nerfed how powerful Iron Man was… And then concluded with “ I don’t need the armor”… Only for Age of Ultron and later appearances to have more and more armor. It just doesn’t fit in the MCU like other films. It tries to do its own thing and is lesser for it.
I mean, I guess we should be thankful that the kid actor wasn’t terrible.It has some merits, as yes, the humor is good a lot of the time, and half of the Mandarin twist is great (Trevor = Great. Killian = Terrible), and if I look at it as a standalone action comedy, it’s alright… But as an Iron Man movie in the MCU? It’s on the low end for me.
No you were not. I would have given it a D. The whole Mandarin is an actor thing killed a really intense hour of superhero movie. It was the worst twist since “From Dusk to Dawn.” The story of two killers taking a family hostage was much more interesting than the vampire stuff.
Yet you still place it on equal footing with star trek into darkness. Maybe this should actually be about you retroactively downgrading that film to a c-
I give this longwinded, and wholly unnecessary, diatribe a C+.
Honestly if you judge iron man 3 against the rest of the Robert Downey movies then yes it’s the worst… It’s sleep worthy. If you look back at it as a movie to push the mcu further it’s actually good. When people 20 years from now go on binge sessions of the MCU and start including the connected shows and movies that are all tieing into everything from everywhere you’re going to realize that Kevin feige is a mastermind genius… Seriously.
I still reckon you were right with Iron Man 3 , its always felt like the most mean spirited and shitty of the IM movies.
“digital golem-avatar” – this is a lovely phrase.The main thing I would take issue with in this is the idea that a C+ is a good movie with a few flaws. A C+ is a 1 1/2 star out of 4 movie. Maybe this was growing up with a different grading system as a kid, but most class grades are curved to a B+ (I know, not even a B). It sounds to me more like you meant to give the movie two or two and a half stars and you upgraded it now to two and a half or three. Saying C+ is “neither great nor terrible but somewhere in between” is not specific enough, because C+ does mean the film was BAD. Maybe BAD with a few good elements, but BAD. If you show your parents a C+ that’s a lot different than a B-…also if you look at IMDB it takes a lot to go above a 7.0, but it takes a lot to go below a 5.0 also, the impression is that generally movies are like bad pizza, even the bad ones aren’t that bad because we will sit through almost anything. Shit, even Pitchfork rarely hands out grades under 5.0 (especially since it became the top music site and reconciled itself with mainstream music). At the very least, a C+ is a grade below 5.0.In any case, agonizingly going over inane concepts like review grade inflation is what comments sections are for, so I hope you get one last dose of the commentariat such as it stands after the decimation, and that once somebody comes to their fucking senses they change course and hire you all back. I was around in the comment boards back when you started (under a different handle) and I’m still here, maybe everything that dies someday comes back.
Got it right the first time. Tonys arc is great in the film though and considering his ending elevates what they did with his character but other than that the film itself is boring, every character in the film bar Pepper is boring and the mandarin twist that everyone loves was awful for me personally.
Godspeed Dowd. The site was richer for your C+s.
No, not tough enough, both IM 2 and 3 are complete trash. It’s astounding on amount of “reworking MCU” history going around. MCU has had many sh*t films – really would wish more folks would acknowledge this and Iron Man 2 and 3 are definitely apart of it. Unwatchable disasters.