Robert Downey Jr. returns to drama with The Judge

Iron Man star Robert Downey Jr. has shed his box-office-busting superhero suit to take on a quiet family drama in the Toronto film festival opener The Judge, but got little love from critics on Friday.

In the film, which represents a return to his roots in dramatic roles, Downey Jr plays a slick Chicago defense lawyer who heads back to his Indiana hometown.

There, he must defend his father — a prominent judge played by Robert Duvall — in a murder trial, despite their bitterly dysfunctional relationship.

The movie “isn’t one of the big tempo (films) which Robert and I have been living in for a while,” his wife Susan, one of the film’s producers, told reporters at the festival, the largest in North America.

“Our hope is that this will get us going on that conversation of ‘can we put out movies about real people’,” she said, adding that it was inspired by older studio films with “just people talking.”

“Sometimes it’s nice to have (films) that don’t involve just defending the world,” she said.

After a flurry of dramatic roles early in his career, including his Oscar-nominated turn as Charlie Chaplin, Downey Jr. has recently become the king of the action-packed blockbusters.

His starring roles in the Iron Man and Avengers franchises based on Marvel comic book characters, as well as his turn as famed detective Sherlock Holmes, were all huge box office hits.

The Los Angeles Times said his latest film combines a family drama with 1990s adaptations of John Grisham legal thrillers The Client and The Firm.

But “to make headway with the Academy (for an Oscar nod)... it will need a strong commercial run,” the Times wrote.

Industry journal Variety described The Judge as an “engrossing, unwieldy hurricane of a movie that plays like a small-town courtroom thriller by way of a testosterone-fuelled remake of August: Osage County.”

Cast opposite Downey are Oscar winner Duvall and Oscar-nominated Vera Farmiga (Up in the Air), as well as Vincent D’Onofrio and Dax Shepard.

Acting legend Duvall said “working with these people... even at my age (allowed me) to grow a little bit.”

Downey said he enjoyed the return to a smaller, family-driven story.

“We (cast and crew) all come from places that are different than we’re necessarily associated with... and so in some ways it’s a return to where we’ve always been,” Downey said.

Recalling director David Dobkin’s rigorous rehearsal process for the film, he said it was “unlike anything I’ve been through since I was going to theatre arts or doing regional theatre.”

“I think I remember a movie or two back when rehearsal was actually booked as part of the preproduction time and it seems to have just evaporated,” he explained.

“This is how we used to do it.”