So, we have another Marvel superhero. This time, it’s not a geeky kid who can climb walls. It’s a millionaire playboy who can fly becuase of repulsor jets and doesn’t need spider webs to be the coolest new superhero around.
Robert Downey Jr. (Good Night and Good Luck, Zodiac) plays Tony Stark, a selfish, high-profile businessman who runs Stark Industries, the world’s leading producer of weaponry. He is on a trip to the Middle East, demonstrating his newest killing machine, a cluster missile called the Jericho. While riding in a military tank, Stark finds himself kidnapped and the rest of the soldiers dead. He soon finds out that the Ten Rings, a terrorist group, has captured him in order to get him to build a Jericho missile for them. Working with fellow captive and eventual friend Dr. Yinsen (Shaun Toub, Broken Arrow), Stark instead builds a suit out of sturdy scraps. He makes his escape and flies off, although there is a tragedy. Arriving back home after 3 months in captivity, Stark is a changed man and realizes that he must stop his weapon building industry, which angers co-owner Obidiah Stane (Jeff Bridges, K-PAX). Stark reasons that he was horrified by seeing the soldiers he rode in the tank with killed by his own weapons. So, Stark begins going around the world destroying his own creations in a red and gold suit with cover from military friend James Rhodes (Terrence Howard, Hustle and Flow) while Stane and Stark’s assistant Pepper Potts (Gwyneth Paltrow, Shakespeare in Love) make everything seem as normal as possible back home. The climax comes when Stark finds that someone he knows personally put out the hit on him.
Iron Man could be considered one of the greatest films of the summer. It is possibly the best that I saw, beating out The Chronicles of Narnia: Prince Caspian and Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull. Possibly the best thing about this film is the performance of Downey Jr., who surprised me because I had never seen him in a film before in a major role, just as a minor major character in George Clooney’s Good Night and Good Luck. He seems so real as the millionaire, the world famous guy who is doing a great job of acting because his name is nowhere near those such as Hanks, Clooney, and Cruise. His performance, along with the super cool gadgets and CGI, make this a summer blockbuster worth seeing.
Grade: B+
