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Iron Man (uip)

Director:
Jon Favreau

Featuring:
Robert Downey Jnr, Jeff Bridges, Terrence Howard and Gwyneth Paltrow

Rating: ****

Robert Downey Jnr is one of the best actors of his generation and one of the most popular with the ladies. In Iron Man he joins Tobey McGuire (Spider-Man) and Christian Bale (Batman) in embodying a comicbook hero so successfully that no-one else will ever be able to do the role justice.

Like Batman, Iron Man is a self-made hero, he is not bitten by a spider like Spider-Man or born on Krypton like Superman. His journey to greatness begins in a cave in Afghanistan as the prisoner of a ruthless warlord.

Downey is Tony Stark, a brilliant inventor and weapons developer with an eye for the ladies and an unshakeable belief in his father’s adage that peace is only possible if your country has a bigger stick than the others. This belief is shaken when he travels to Afghanistan to show off his latest missile to the troops and is kidnapped in an ambush that damages his body so badly he has to be kept alive with a magnet and a car battery.

His captors force him to make a missile for them, but instead he builds something else – an impenetrable iron suit to escape in.

Gwyneth Paltrow, who doesn’t work much these days, is great as Stark’s righthand woman Pepper Potts. Both Jeff Bridges and Terrence Howard also give great performances and director Jon Favreau (Zathura: A Space Adventure, Elf) has taken his career to the next level with this slick flick with incredible special effects and a topical story.

Also co-created by Stan Lee (Spider-Man, Fantastic Four, The Hulk and Daredevil), Iron Man first appeared on the pages of Marvel comics in 1963 and was a regular member of The Avengers superhero team. According to Wikipedia, Lee’s Iron Man is based on Howard Hughes, the rich, adventurous, ladies’ man who was also a little crazy. The comics always had as their focus national security and technological advancement, which the film does too, making it relevant to a younger generation who are constantly upgrading their lives to accommodate the latest techno trend.

The film doesn’t shy away from exploring America’s role as global policeman and it also poses questions about corporate ethics, or rather lack thereof, as companies sell to the highest bidder, even if that bidder is the enemy. Iron Man is essentially an answer to this dilemma, he is a man who does right no matter what. A real hero, in other words.

Iron Man is perhaps not as popular as Spidey or the Dark Knight, but I think Downey’s performance and this thrilling film might just raise Iron Man’s profile. Gayle Edmunds

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