Entertainment
These 5 Robert Downey Jr. Movies Are His True Masterpieces
Before Iron Man, Robert Downey Jr. went through a long, very public struggle with addiction and legal trouble, and for a while it looked like Hollywood had moved on without him. Then came the role of Tony Stark in 2008 that propelled him to A-list stardom. From that point on, he has turned into one of the most bankable stars working in cinema, so much so that Marvel even brought him back after wrapping up his Iron Man arc, this time to play one of its biggest villains yet, Doctor Doom.
But Downey has been delivering memorable performances long before Iron Man, since the 1990s, in fact. And he’s never once shown up to simply collect a paycheck. Time and time again, he completely disappears into the role at hand and creates characters that are still talked about years later. So, here are some Robert Downey Jr. movies that are flat-out masterpieces.
‘Kiss Kiss Bang Bang’ (2005)
Kiss Kiss Bang Bang is one of the funniest, most criminally underseen films of the 2000s. Downey plays Harry Lockhart, a small-time thief who stumbles into an acting audition while fleeing the scene of a botched robbery. The accidental audition goes surprisingly well, and he gets flown out to Los Angeles for a screen test. He is then paired with a private investigator named Gay Perry (Val Kilmer) for research purposes, and the two of them end up getting tangled in a deadly conspiracy.
Downey also serves as the film’s unreliable narrator, and he is insanely funny here. He tends to go off on unrelated tangents mid-scene. He constantly loses his train of thought. And every once in a while, he stops the movie to apologize for forgetting to explain something important that already happened. This kind of comedic device could become very gimmicky in lesser hands, but Downey makes it feel genuinely hilarious. If you love films like The Nice Guys, In Bruges, or The Gentlemen, Kiss Kiss Bang Bang should be at the top of your watchlist.
‘Chaplin’ (1992)
The 1992 Richard Attenborough film follows Charlie Chaplin‘s life from his impoverished childhood in Edwardian London all the way through his rise to Hollywood superstardom. And from there, it also covers his turbulent string of marriages and his eventual exile from the United States during the Red Scare. It is a massive, sprawling story covering decades of one of the most fascinating lives in entertainment history.
But arguably the greatest thing about Chaplin is Downey’s performance. He perfectly captures Charlie Chaplin’s physical mannerisms, his comedic grace, and his tragic personal flaws with phenomenal precision, from his early twenties all the way into old age, and never once loses the thread of who this person was underneath the legend. It even earned Downey an Academy Award nomination for Best Actor in 1993.
‘Tropic Thunder’ (2008)
Tropic Thunder is an action-comedy loaded with offensive jokes that eviscerate the Hollywood studio system and lampoon the toxic egos of A-list actors with a ferocity that no major studio film has really matched since. It’s the exact kind of movie Hollywood doesn’t make anymore. The premise follows a group of actors shooting a big-budget war film whose director drops them into an actual jungle with hidden cameras to capture the actors’ authentic performances. However, things soon spiral out of control when the actors stumble into the middle of an actual warzone and think it’s all make-believe.
Downey is especially funny here as Kirk Lazarus, a delusional, multi-Oscar-winning Australian method actor. And he is front and centre in what is considered the most iconic (and the most controversial) joke in the entire movie, where Downey appears in blackface because he’s extremely committed to his role as a Black Vietnam War sergeant, and goes around spouting the N-word. The irony is that the performance ended up earning him an actual Oscar nomination for Best Supporting Actor.
‘Oppenheimer’ (2023)
Christopher Nolan‘s Oppenheimer follows J. Robert Oppenheimer (Cillian Murphy), the theoretical physicist who spearheaded the Manhattan Project and built the atomic bomb, and the devastating personal consequences that followed. At the center of those consequences is Downey as Rear Admiral Lewis Strauss, the scheming bureaucrat who serves as the film’s primary antagonist and orchestrates the revocation of Oppenheimer’s security clearance during the paranoia of the Red Scare. Strauss begins the film as an ally and admirer of Oppenheimer before slowly letting his resentment curdle into something more bitter.
By 2023, Downey had spent over a decade almost exclusively playing Tony Stark, so seeing him take on a more dramatic villainous role with no quips and no arc of redemption was genuinely startling. He was playing completely against type, and he was extraordinary doing it. The performance was universally praised as the best of his career, and it also won him the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor.
‘Iron Man’ (2008)
No film on this list changed cinema quite like Iron Man. This was the movie that kick-started the MCU and turned the superhero genre into the cultural phenomenon that it is today. The story follows Tony Stark, a genius weapons manufacturer who is captured by terrorists while demonstrating his latest missile in Afghanistan. He builds a rudimentary suit of armor to escape and then comes home, shuts down his weapons division, and builds a better suit to become a full-time superhero.
It’s got great action sequences, a killer soundtrack, and delivers a perfectly satisfying superhero origin story, but none of it would have worked without Downey. He perfectly slid into the genius billionaire playboy philanthropist persona of Tony Stark like the role was explicitly written for him. Before his portrayal, Iron Man was no more than a B-list Marvel character. After Downey, he has become most people’s favorite superhero.
Iron Man
- Release Date
-
April 30, 2008
- Runtime
-
126 minutes
- Writers
-
Matt Holloway, Art Marcum, Hawk Ostby
You must be logged in to post a comment Login