Summer gets an Iron Boost!

Rating: 8/10 (2 May 2008)

The Summer season is here and this year it gets an iron boost from finally a new marvel comic franchise hopeful. Having no expectations for Iron Man I was more than surprised with how much I enjoyed it.
This time the Iron Man-to-be, Tony Starks (Robert Downey Jr.), is a weapons manufacturing billionaire, not a nerdy college student. He doesn't need to buy a car to win over his childhood sweetheart, but instead has a super-sized garage with six cars and an assistant (Gwyneth Paltrow) who gets rid of his one night stands. In short, he lives it up in all the luxury one could dream of.
While visiting a US base in Afghanistan to sell more of his weapons, the humvee he is riding is ambushed and he is taken captive by Afghani insurgents. They force him to build them one of his famous bombs, but instead he builds a great big metal suit! A suit which he uses to escape back to America successfully, and once home starts building a better one. Seeing the destruction of his weapons when they fall into the hands of insurgents he wants to shut down his weapons company. This does not go over well with a few people and brings us to a climatic fight between a villain (I will let you be surprised who it is) and Iron Man.
The casting was perfect. Robert Downey Jr. plays his part as the fast-talking, careless billionaire who gets a reality check brilliantly, and Gwyneth Paltrow is immensely entertaining as Pepper Potts, his cool, calculated assistant. Together they have the perfect amount of chemistry that only increases your desire to see Iron Man II.
Iron Man is a strong beginning to what will hopefully, yes I am actually hoping for more, be a successful franchise. Unfortunately with it being a good beginning, is where it faltered, only a little. First you could really tell it was setting up for more as there are actually very few scenes of Iron Man flying around (there are actually many more scenes of Tony building and testing his Iron Man suit) and secondly the end battle was not as spectacular or even intense as most superhero climaxes and ended rather quickly.
Still Iron Man is a strong, very strong film to open the Summer Season, and does not disappoint. The mark of a good film is when, even with a running time of 126 minutes, it leaves you wanting more!