Plenty of Moving Parts In This Movie

Rating: 9/10 (28 September 2014)

Plot
Tony Stark (Robert Downey Jr.) travels to Afghanistan to showcase his new wares to the United States Army. The demonstration goes as planned, but on his way back to base he is attacked, injured and held for ransom by a local warlord. He is given materials and told to build weapons for his captors, only he plans for escape instead by constructing an armed metal suit. With the help of a fellow inmate he earns his freedom and is soon rescued. Upon returning home he surprises his business partner Obadiah Stane (Jeff Bridges) when he talks openly about not having his company manufacture weapons anymore. At the same time Tony is distancing himself from Obadiah he is growing closer to his longtime employee Pepper Potts (Gwyneth Paltrow), but most of the hours of the day are spent designing and building a more advance version of the suit that he used to escape with.
Character Development
The Tony Stark protagonist is such an unbelievably shallow character it would seem easy to let the performance just go as that, but there were degrees of change to show some growth from earlier scenes. Yet I wish Tony was not so wisecracking all the time and was a little more serious. The only thing that seemed to silence his manic streak were great pain and near death experiences. Mostly it was a consist state of clownishness. The rest of the cast played into this storm like a twister would suck up a farmhouse. Tony's character completely ran over everyone and everyone was a victim to it.
Acting
Most of the cast was quite enjoyable. Robert Downey Jr. played the lead well, Gwyneth Paltrow was very charming, but I will have to give the most accolades to Jeff Bridges for playing a rich and well-rounded part. He is the one who really brought this picture together.
Overview
There is plenty of moving parts in this movie so there is much joy in seeing them come together. The sides here shift and not everything is a known quality. It is clever in how the conclusion came together, which shows some forethought and planning on part of the writers and director. The overall completion definitely covers up the imperfections of the sum of its parts.