We had a lot of comic book adaptions in the zeros, and the best of them, contrary to what you might have heard, is Iron Man. I promise you that this is a better movie than The Dark Knight. Go back and watch them again if you don’t believe me. I’m not sure what’s led people to get confused about this—I think maybe people have decided that the use of a darker color pallet makes Dark Knight more serious, which is itself a lot sillier than using bright colors in your comic book adaptation. Dark Knight isn’t even as good as Batman Begins!
Let me just emphasize that in my view you really need to rewatch mainstream hit movies to form sound opinions about them. This is stuff that’s meant to be replayed on cable until the End Times. To just stay within the intra-Batman comparisons, once you already know what’s going to happen the tension totally drains away from the ferry-bomb stuff. By contrast knowing the Ra’s al-Ghul reveal makes the earlier training scenes cooler, it doesn’t ruin them.
I spent the decade as a real comic book adaptation completist, so I can tell you with some confidence that Daredevil and Elektra are the two worst of the decade. Considerably worse than the awful Fantastic Four 2. But which is the very worst? I think that to give a fair answer I would need to rewatch them but that’s a fate too horrible to contemplate.
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