Director	Jon Favreau
Length	126 mins
Certificate	12A
Rating	Film making: 3  Personal enjoyment: 4

Tony Stark (Robert Downey Jr.) is the world’s foremost weapons manufacturer. When demonstrating his latest invention in Afghanistan he is ambushed by terrorists who try to force him to create one of his weapons for their use. This experience leads him to reassess his powerful position in the world, and to his constructing an almost invincible suit of body armour with near-infinite potential.

Iron Man is a not-quite-slick superhero movie that uses its occasional inconsistencies and slightly flabby eccentricities to its advantage. It is an unusually charming and witty blockbuster rather than a particularly pulse-pounding one, cultivating a refreshing lightness of touch where many like it opt instead for either a leaden seriousness (e.g.: late Star Wars [1999-2004], The Matrix [1999-2004]) or an overly-aggressive playfulness (e.g.: Pirates of the Caribbean [2005-7], Transformers [2007]). This film, by contrast, carries its comedy intelligently, and its drama relatively subtly, and brings from both moments that feel ‘real’ despite the highly stylised action-movie template that they exist, and sometimes struggle, within. We might almost compare it with the Apatow school of romantic comedy (Knocked Up [2007], Forgetting Sarah Marshall [2008], etc.) in this respect: films concerned with keeping one eye firmly on the ‘real world’ whilst simultaneously striving to deliver traditional genre pleasures - a strategy that often results in slightly messy but nonetheless rewarding movies. Alongside Favreau’s deadpan direction, Downey Jr. deserves a great deal of the praise for the film’s ability to exist somewhere pleasing between these two poles, though he is also very ably assisted by a (usefully small) cast of shrewdly-pitched supporting performances from Jeff Bridges, Gwyneth Paltrow, and Terrence Howard.

Two other factors contribute to the slight-but-important sense of ‘realness’ that stops the film from floating away entirely into the ether of strangely-flat fantasies that many of its brethren call home: its connections to our actual current political landscape, and its approach to special effects. On its surface, the presentation of a dark and dangerous Middle East here doesn’t look particularly different than that of any number of other action films (though the presence of a situation as real as the ‘War on Terror’ in a comic book movie is in itself important). There is, however, the unmistakable undertone of allegory here concerning fears of the U.S.’s dubious role as both ‘peacekeeper’ and arms-supplier to the region - one that is not stressed, but is nevertheless present and rather poignant, if not quite fully coherent. As for the special effects, it is another testament to the film’s commitment to some form of ‘realism’ that the Iron Man suit looks almost always as if it is an actual physical object rather than a computer-generated one, even when it may in fact be the product of CGI: it is, for example, not too gleaming clean, it feels solid. The look of it harks back to the late 70s/80s period of Hollywood action adventures for which animatronics and models were used far more commonly than computer graphics, and which consequently often convinced far more easily than the shiny, flat, virtual objects that began to replace them during the 90s.

Iron Man is not a great film - not even if only compared with other excellent recent comic book adaptations like Batman Begins (2005) or Spiderman 2 (2005) - but it is certainly an enjoyable and worthwhile one that actually delivers on its promise of fun, and has a number of qualities to recommend it (of which more in the Alternate Take). At the very least, it stands with Cloverfield (2008) as the best and smartest blockbuster of the year thus far.