Meets the hype - unusual accomplishment for a summer blockbuster

Rating: Null/10 (2 June 2008)

Spiderman was good. Batman was good until the 'Prince parade' scene. And now Iron Man.
I almost went in not wanting to like the film. Robert Downey is not exactly a popular Hollywood star. JF is not a great director (he casts himself as a supporting player in early scenes). And the promos featured Sabbath's song, which I though would be inappropriate at anything but the closing credits. Sure enough, that's where it was, all the way at the LONNNNNGGG closing credits - what were there? 100, 200, 300 stuntmen, stunt drivers, stunt extra, stunt directors, I don't know? I've never seen credits that long. And the teaser was that if you sat through the longest run of movies credits ever, you'd see a 2min clip suggesting a sequel.
In short, the clip is that our hero comes into his high ceiling 'living'/oceanview room, and there's a black guy with an eye patch who identifies himself as, Nick Fury. He says he has something to do with National/Homeland security, and that Stark is not the 'only hero'. So the sequel is about government agents in Ironman suits? Still, if JF can produce even 3/4 the film he did here in the sequel, that too will be some accomplishment.
The plot of Ironman is that Stark is a technological genius/phenom. He can engineer and build a Learjet from two scraps of paper and a bottle of Sprite. McGiver has nothing on him. His dad was a munitions maker who went into the government-contract game with the heavy, played by Jeff Bridges (I just couldn't help flashing back to Big Z from the surfing penguin movie - his voice was so memorable).
Dad dies, off camera, and the young Stark is in it with Bridges, both self-righteously touting their defense of freedom by superior weaponry - which is fine as far as it goes. But our hero is naive, and doesn't realize that the enemy can grab up weapons on the field of battle, too. Sure enough, on a sales tour to Iraq, his motorcade is hit and he is captured. And sure enough, the bad guys have a bunch of equipment from his company. He even asks, where did you get "my" guns.
Perhaps it's best to think of Jr. Stark as an idiot savant. He builds an ironman suits from discarded rocket parts, basically. His captors know who he is and want him to construct the weapons he had just sold on his sales tour. But it gets to the point where his suit doesn't look anything like the rockets he's supposed to be building.
In fact, the core technology is some sort of reactor. He builds a small version, with parts on hand. And somehow it gives his suit 'super-powers'. He can sustain flight with chemical boosters far longer than there is chemical in the boosters (that he can fly, period, with no control surfaces is bizarre). He is equipped with flame throwers that make the jets from the old island hopping WWII tanks look like toys. And so on. But it's only a prototype. He makes his escape. But he lands a short distance away. He wanders the desert. He gets rescued. But the bad guys find the remnants of the suit.
Cut to chase, he returns home a changed man. He wants a bigger and better suit. Turns out partner, Bridges, is really a psycho, who is invited by the bad guys to Iraq to view the suit. His bad guys kill all those bad guys. And he works on his own suit, sort of the bigger, badder 'robocop', that we've seen before.
Stark's girl Friday, Miss Potts, discovers the secret of area 16 and the super-suit. She gets government agents to close in. But Bridges dons the suit, kills some of them, and goes after her. Sure enough, Stark/Ironman flies in to save the day, and is almost killed himself.
One place where perhaps the film goes off-note is when Bridges team so effortlessly kills the bad Arabs who had been threatening locals with Stark's weapons. It's a little too easy. Should have been a fight. And the other is the big plot hole as to why Stark needs a hole in his chest. At first, it was to prevent shrapnel from sinking into vital tissues. But he could have had that fixed upon his returns. He continues to wear the reactor in his chest, which is how he 'powers' his suits. And it's not explained why the reactor is there, or could itself be damaging soft tissues with radiation. Bridges 'super-robo' suit uses the same reactor. And he doesn't have to wear it in his chest.
But apart from that, it's interesting to see the tie in to the terrorist problem in Iraq and frontier regions there. It's interesting to see the sets. The pacing is good. The acting is fine. Marvel and JF did quite a job with this. But, dang, those are some long closing credits.