Starring: Robert Downey Jr., Terrence Howard, Gwyneth Paltrow, Jeff Bridges
Director: Jon Favreau
Release Date: May 1, 2008
Running Time: 126 min
MPAA Rating: PG-13
Distributor: Paramount Pictures

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Review by David DiMichele

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Look past the scorching cosmic-candy red armor that Iron Man dons - which will have fan boys salivating feverishly - and you’ll find that director Jon Favreau has created a superhero film that puts the action on the back burner in order to focus on a deeper and more resonant worldly conflict. I’m not saying the action isn’t there. We get an initial abundance of the high testosterone action that Marvel comics used back in 1963. But what makes Iron Man distinctly different to previous superhero films is its well-polished script, written by the team that brought us Children of Men. This script invites us to shift our minds from action to a profoundly important issue, and that’s more than any other comic book-to-screen adaptation has ever dared to do.

Hats off to the highly underappreciated Robert Downey Jr., who flew beneath everyone’s radar with his spotless Zodiac performance. He is now guaranteed to make heads turn with what seems to be effortless talent. As billionaire industrialist Tony Stark, he embodies a serene state of coolness while at the same time channeling a side of rebellious attitude. There isn’t anything Stark can’t do. Behind his essence of cool there’s a magnificent genius lurking - a genius who uses his smarts to produce weapons of mass destruction. In other words he’s an arms dealer, but without a doubt he’s the freshest and coolest arms dealer in recent memory.

Amplified by the fact that Stark has an endless source of money, he luxuriates in the ‘good life.’ Tooling around Vegas and Californian hot spots in an exotic car with women who yearn to spend the night in his nothing less than grand home is pure Tony Stark. But even with all these sumptuous toys at his disposal, he still finds time to travel to Afghanistan to present the American troops with a new weapon that he has created. The pleasure he takes in life come from the harsh fact that his company, Stark Enterprises, is engaged in the production of weapons of mass destruction.. Hell, Stark’s father, who put the company on the map, helped create the atomic bomb. Apple doesn’t fall far from the tree….

His new weapon assures the conclusion of yet another successful business deal. When all the congratulations are through, he hops into a humvee with three soldiers to make his way home. What follows is an attack on the vehicle which leaves the soldiers dead and Stark fighting to stay alive. But when he sees his company’s name on the bomb that hit them, his life is changed forever. He’s kidnapped and placed inside a cave with a fellow prisoner (Shaun Toub) who helps him create a heart device to stay alive. The terrorists demand that Stark create a bomb for them. Instead, his creation is a ferocious prototype of the scorching cosmic-candy red armor that Stark will don once he is back on American soil.

And with all this happening, we get a new, more mature version of the previous superhero films. Stark is quite unique and excellently created compared with the heroes that we’re already on familiar terms with. He wasn’t born with any special powers and he doesn’t develop them either. Instead, he was born with a human heart that has a hefty amount of sincerity to it.

When he finds out that his partner, who was also his father’s partner, Obadiah Stone (Jeff Bridges) is dabbling in troubled waters with certain groups, he wants to shut down production of weapons of mass destruction. It becomes so long to the days when Stark stayed up in a sweat creating the next big weapon, and hello to the days when he realizes the sins he was committing by creating these weapons. News coverage labels him ‘crazy’ and suggests he lay off work for awhile - all because he wants to make good for a change.

The performances by Terrence Howard as Stark’s military advisor and Gwyneth Paltrow as Stark’s secretary are respectively neat and sexy. Both of them deliver and bring life to an already lively script.

Iron Man reminds us why we spend money and time at the movies. There’s nothing like rooting for the hero and cringing when the enemy gets the upper hand... We watch Stark undergoing an extreme transformation - at one point he’s proud to call himself Iron Man rather than ‘arms dealer’. Director Jon Favreau has the ability to fill the big screen with scenes that not only to stir up the audience’s emotions, but also to fuse them with action scenes that send us into a state of frenzy. To inject such an important topic into a comic book shows us how marvelous Marvel comics are. Here is the destination that every other film this summer will have to reach in order to achieve “summer blockbuster status,” let alone greatness. Iron Man achieves greatness, and as a superhero film it achieves it with flying colors.

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