The mechanical encrusted on the living, with a a vodka martini

Rating: 8/10 (15 May 2008)

Is this story supposed to have political significance? In it Tony Stark (Robert Downey Jr.), the brilliant playboy scion of a megabucks American weapons manufacturer (are there cut-rate ones?), discovers that his company's products, which he ostensibly thought used to protect the US and preserve "peace," are being supplied to some multinational bad guys in Afghanistan. To keep us guessing about who's being demonized this time, these blokes speak Egyptian Arabic, Dari, Pushtu, Hungarian, and after that I lost track. You wonder how they carry out their operations since they change languages every five minutes. Naturally their leader turns out to speak perfect English so he can spar verbally with Tony as the need arises.
While Mr. Stark is held prisoner with a friendly foreign scientist, he's supposed to develop a super-rocket so the bad guys can take over the whole region if not the world, but miraculously he manages to conceal the fact that he's in fact not doing that at all but engineering a spectacular escape by cobbling together a giant robotic weapons-fitted iron suit out of scraps. That'll show them.
Oh and by the way, Stark's chest got filled with shrapnel when the baddies captured him, so he's fitted first with a giant magnet to keep the lethal metal from going to his heart, and then some sort of artificial heart gadget. It's supposed to be a wonder but we're not to know how it works. All we know is that it gives out a luminous glow. It's the symbol that Tony himself, hitherto into life only for the pleasure it could give him, has acquired an ability to care. He rushes home, flying through the air being one of his suit's abilities, and after declaring his Stark Weapons Technologies out of the weapons business, begins devising a much more high tech and sleek version of the robotic suit thing, in red, and no longer made of iron but some sorts of miraculous alloys.
There is a little of James Bond in Tony Stark. He likes to drink, he likes women, and frankly, up to now, he doesn't give a damn. On top of that he has wavy hair, a sharp mustache, a nice tan, and a fearsome intellect. His repartee is rapid fire and offhand and only occasionally mimics the delivery of Kevin Spacey. Remember Bond's blazing Astin Martin? This robotic suit thingy is some sort of grossly hypertrophied offshoot.
There are two kinds of real fun in Iron Man for those who are patient enough to sit through all the wizard explosions and pointless political confusion. One is the dazzling special effects of Tony's private robot suit factory (he shares his process only with tool-manipulating robots that he handles with witty condescension). This stuff becomes most entertaining when Tony learns how to fly, with some nasty bumps along the way; but for gadget geeks the elegant complexity of the artificial limbs and head and the way they click miraculously onto Tony are equally pleasurable. The other fun thing is to see Bridges and Downey Jr. and Paltrow play off each other. Yes, real people can be fun in a movie too.
It ought to be inexorably comic, since the concept of the robot suit donned by a man is such a literal expression of Bergson's definition of comedy--"the mechanical encrusted upon the living." Only it isn't. Nor are obvious, perhaps much too obvious, implications about technology shielding man from his humanity, ever brought to light in this movie.
Well, yet another comic book has been brought to multi-million-dollar screen life in Hollywood. Favreau has assembled an excellent cast and one stops wondering why they bother (for the money, yes?) when one sees how typically mercurial and witty Robert Downey Jr. is in the lead, how disconcertingly unpleasant Jeff Bridges becomes as Obadiah Stone, his would-be nemesis, and how appealing and present Gywneth Paltrow is in the neutral role of Tony Dare's (Downey's) girl Friday, Pepper Potts (cute name). Terrence Howard is wasted and too mild as some kind of air force commander who basically just works for the weapons company.
You might wonder why Iron Man has done so well with adult film critics. Isn't this just adolescent fare given a mild gloss of adulthood and a heavy extra coat of S/X? But then you think of how much better this is than the competition, and you understand.