Hey, Wait a Minute--Iron Man Movie

OK, if you haven't seen then Iron Man movie, now's a good time to come back later, because I have a question that's kind of .

So go away. Or, better yet, go see the movie.

Still there? OK, well, after the picture, there be spoilers.

So, despite a pretty tight script, I have ONE FREAKIN' HUGE QUESTION.

As we saw, Tony Stark is captured in Afghanistan, escapes, comes home, announces the Stark Industries ain't making weapons. Stane doesn't like this, and has Tony frozen out by the Stark Board, while selling weapons to terrorist groups. Clear, right?

And after we find out that Stane is a low-life snake (PRO-TIP: don't trust people named Obidiah), it's revealed that Stane was behind the initial attack on Stark, that it was supposed to be an assassination, that he had paid Ten Rings to do it.

OK, wait. Not many people have noticed this, because we knew by this point that Stane stunk. But WHY, exactly, did Stane try to kill Tony Stark earlier??

• Stark was still firmly on board with the "we make weapons to make peace" idea


• Stark was still designing highly profitable weapons systems


• Stark was nowhere near discovering that Stane was selling weapons under the table


• Stark's lifestyle seemed to leave little likelihood that he would become involved in the inner workings of the company

So again, why would Stane try to kill Stark at this point??? After all, if an announcement that Tony wasn't making weapons anymore would send the stock plunging 56 points, what would the announcement that Stark was DEAD, and therefore not making anything, do to stock prices? As we saw, the "chief scientists" Stane had left were, by their own admission, "no Tony Stark."

Now, this is hardly a fatal flaw. We can surmise that Stane had finally grown bored with Stark's act; that Stane knew he wasn't going to get any younger, so if he was going to make a move it would have to be now; that Stane knew with a fat lump of cash from the Jericho sale to the US military, he could weather any financial storm from Stark's death.

Still, this is something the movie should have spelled out for us...a single line of dialogue somewhere is all that it would have taken. And maybe it's in a scene somewhere on the cutting room floor.

But because they didn't (or someone fell asleep at the switch), we're left with the puzzling question of why Stane tried to kill Stark when he was still in Stane's camp.

Bonus spoiler: I 75% expected that it would be revealed that Stane was behind the car accident that killed Tony's parents, as a power play to control the company before Tony came of age. I'm glad they didn't do this...there's an unfortunate tendency in comic book movies to make the villain responsible for EVERYTHING that ever went wrong in a hero's life. It's become a cliche, one the movie makers happily avoided (unless that, too, is on the cutting room floor).