Iron Man

Na-na, na-na-na. Oh yeah, David Hollingworth is impressed with the latest addition to the Marvel Movies universe.

Iron Man, I’m happy to report, avoids the pitfalls of the comic-book-to-movie with much the same agility and flair that Tony Stark dodges air to air missiles. History has taught us that superhero movies can be hit and miss affairs; for Every X-Men 2 there seems to be, well… an X-Men 3.

Comic heroics can be hard to treat well on the big screen. It all comes down to the treatment the story gets, from the manner in which the actors hold themselves while delivering jargon-thick lines to the ease and confidence of the director handling the action itself, not to mention the difficulty of acting alongside and directing effects-heavy sequences. Iron Man has a mess of super-science jargon, American patriotism, difficult to like characters and some whizz-bang effects, but for all that it’s the human scenes – especially pretty much every scene with Robert Downey Jr’s boozey Stark – that remain longest in the memory. DowneyJr and director Jon Favreau have done a tremendous job.

The movie opens with Stark being conveyed across an Afghan desert by Airforce hum vees, right before a terrorist ambush that results in Stark’s apparent capture. We then get a convenient flashback to the previous 36 hours, which deftly illustrates Stark’s playboy lifestyle, introduces nearly every other major character and explains just what he was doing in a military convoy in the middle of a warzone.

Stark, as he is in the comics, is a genius when it comes to making shit, and Stark Industries is the world’s leading weapons manufacturer. Does Stark care what happens when his weapons get used, however? Well, not as such – war keeps him in business, and he’s pretty happy with the way business is going.

That is, until he gets a dose of it up close.

The movie is pretty much Iron Man’s origin story, from the construction of his first, rather clunky, armour suit up to the more sophisticated – and damned sexy – marks II and III. Stark never loses his charm and Downey Jr is more than capable of carrying the character from self-interested-hedonistic-playboy-industrialist to crime-fighting-hedonistic-playboy-industrialist. There’s also a cast of Middle Eastern villains for him to robot-punch into submission, as well as a curious yet entertaining turn from Jeff ‘The Dude’ Bridges as classic comic badguy Obadiah Stane.

And, of course, there’s a goodly amount of CGI flying about and blowing, punching and generally busting shit up. That said, Favreau never allows it to dominate the story; like the good X-Men and Spiderman movies, this is very much a story about good and evil that just happens to have giant robots and powered armour. Some of the effects shots do seem a little rushed, but the for the most part you’ll be too busy drooling over the rippling control surfaces of the Iron Man armour or the details in the holographic displays that Stark uses to refine his designs to really notice.

But, more than all of that, the one thing the movie has on its side is that it’s unashamedly funny. Downey Jr’s Stark is practically Dean Martin-esque at, flitting from Vegas casino to cocktail party with ease, a woman (or women) at his shoulder at all times. Sure, the gravitas that all superhero stories thrive on is here, but not at the expense of having a good time.

Which is the Stark ethos, really. And we’re not complaining.