Dry, bland...like a slice of toast with no butter on it.

Rating: 5/10 (20 April 2009)

Iron Man started out pretty well, with a violent attack by the Taliban resulting in our hero being captured, but from then on it just set up loads of movie standard clichés until the predictable end.
For those not in the know, Tony Stark is a genius inventor of weapons, making a fortune from war and such like, living a playboy lifestyle while Gwyneth Paltrow looks after him and his business partner Jeff Bridges makes up for Stark's lack of public face. When Stark is captured in Afghanistan and forced to build a rocket for the baddies, he sees the error his ways and instead builds himself an Iron Man suit.
What then? Well, we get an awful lot of interaction between Downey and Paltrow, an awful lot of footage of him testing his suit and an alarmingly large of amount of moments where you'll think to yourself 'I knew that was going to happen'.
That's the worrying thing about Iron Man - It's got great effects and such like, but the story itself is just textbook Hollywood tosh - You know who the bad guy is, you know what's going to happen at the end, and even the clever part involving various devices for keeping Stark's heart going should be accompanied by a large sign saying 'foreshadowing'.
And he didn't even iron anything! Not even a shirt or a pair of trousers...bleh.