Director: Jon Favreau
Running time: 125 minutes
***
THE oddest element of Iron Man is also the one that generates most of the picture's goodwill: Robert Downey Jr. As an actor he has more baggage than Terminal
5, yet here he makes it work in the film's favour. Even his age – at 43, almost twice that of actors when they started playing Spider-Man or Superman – lends credibility to the playboy ennui of Marvel comics' bad boy billionaire Tony Stark, who is both goateed and goatish. After seducing a glossy female reporter who tries to doorstep him about his arms deals, Stark is nagged in the office about his lack of press relations. "But I've just done a piece for Vanity Fair," he gibes.
Stark is a self-made superhero, and his powers originate as a piece of lifesaving self-preservation. While out in the desert demonstrating his latest weapon, he is captured by Afghans and ordered to build them a missile with little more than an anvil and a pair of bellows. Being a mechanical genius, he knocks up a rocket-powered suit for himself instead and blasts his way out of his cave prison. Admittedly, it's one of the film's weaker plot points that his captors never wonder why their shock and awe weapon needed a breastplate and a helmet.
Once home, Stark has to deal with his scars, both external and internal. His Achilles' heel is now his heart: a reactor embedded in his chest keeps the shrapnel from one of his own rockets from fatally piercing it, while a new sense of humanity leads him to quit the arms business.
This is a sturdily built vehicle, and yet Iron Man doesn't quite reach smelting point. The film is certainly entertaining and the iron suits look terrific, but the action sequences point out the design flaw of having an expressive actor completely encased in a titanium jacket. Director Jon Favreau keeps cutting to Downey's head inside the helmet but, in the movie's climactic battle, whenever we watch his chunky figure clomp across the landscape, it reminds us of last summer's clunky robot film, Transformers, whose fight scenes looked like demolition day in a scrapyard. Worse, as Iron Man his voice is transformed from Downey's smart-alec baritone into something that resembles James Earl Jones with a tracheotomy shouting commands through the public address system at Alton Towers.
Still, unlike most current screen superheroes, Iron Man feels like grown-up fun. Stark doesn't have any of Spider-Man's adolescent angsting over girlfriends, and the film wisely avoids any of the rebooted Superman's earnest Christian symbolism. Okay, he doesn't have a catchy theme tune, but Stark is witty, charismatic and delightfully flawed.
Downey Jr's swaggering, subversive schtick is undoubtedly the principal pleasure here, and his performance bolts Iron Man together whenever the film's drama begins to feel tinnily insubstantial.
Another bit of unsettlingly good casting is Gwyneth Paltrow, surprisingly appealing as the capable but appallingly monikered Pepper Potts, who, at one point, discovers her boss trapped inside the cleats and pulleys of his embryonic Iron Man suit. Stark is only slightly abashed: "Let's face it, you and I both know this is not the worst thing you've caught me doing."
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On general release
The full article contains 550 words and appears in Scotland On Sunday newspaper.
