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'Iron Man" is just about perfect

Mina Hochberg

12:54 PM EDT, May 1, 2008

Ever since the announcement was made that Robert Downey Jr. would be starring in "Iron Man," skeptics have wondered whether the actor had the mettle to play the metal hero. As it turns out, Downey as Iron Man is a stroke of inspired genius and one of the most creative castings the comic book genre has seen in a long time.

For those not familiar with the hero's back story, Downey plays Tony Stark, a brilliant, billionaire industrialist who owns a major weapons-making company. During a business trip to Afghanistan, he's attacked and kidnapped by jihadists who demand that he build a missile for them. Instead, he cobbles together a bulletproof suit that contains enough retractable weapons to put Inspector Gadget to shame. After he escapes and returns to the U.S., Stark denounces his morally irresponsible company -- much to the chagrin of longtime advisor Obadiah Stane, played by an unrecognizable, bald Jeff Bridges (and we all know what end of the good/evil spectrum movie baldness puts a character on).

Stark buttons up his former playboy image and hunkers down in the technologically pimped-out basement of his cliffside Malibu mansion, where he devotes his time to perfecting the iron suit. He develops several incarnations of the suit throughout the movie, and each version gets its own glorious, debut moment to be ogled. There's something incredibly gratifying about seeing Stark perfect his armor: He isn't born with super powers, nor does some fateful accident endow him with them. Tony Stark forges his powers from scratch, through sheer technical genius and with a great sense of humor to boot. As further sign of his mortality, Stark is forced to live with a device embedded in his chest after his heart is injured by shrapnel from the jihadi attack.

Rather than pack the film with a blockbuster quota of ear-deafening action sequences, director Jon Favreau balances showdowns with scenes that expose Stark the mortal man -- and when you've got Robert "greatest actor of our time" Downey Jr. playing Stark, character-building scenes are nothing short of top-notch. "Iron Man" is such a perfect vehicle for Downey's deadpan, witty delivery, it's hard to imagine another actor pulling it off so well.

The villains are formulaic, but they're mostly incidental, anyway, next to Stark's transformation into a self-made superhero. As many glossy profiles have already predicted, this marks the dawn of a promising new era in Downey's career. The same might go for Gwyneth Paltrow, who plays Pepper Potts, Stark's devoted assistant and latent love interest.

"Iron Man" succeeds in being both immensely fulfilling and perfectly diverting, which is all one could ask for in a summer blockbuster.

Iron Man Directed by Jon Favreau. Starring Robert Downey Jr., Gwyneth Paltrow, Jeff Bridges, Terrence Howard