I went and saw Iron Man last night at a sneak preview at my local theater. In a nutshell, if you like these types of movies (action/adventure, heroic man vs. evil man, fate of the world at stake), you’re going to love this movie. If, on the other hand, you’d rather see something which is going to make you contemplate your life and where it fits into the big scheme of things, you’d be better off staying at home and watching the Lifetime Movie Channel for Women.

The movie stars Robert Downey, Jr. as Tony Stark, billionaire owner of a weapons manufacturing enterprise, child genius who graduated from MIT at the age of 14, and flippant playboy who likes his alcohol a little too much. Stark goes to Afghanistan to demonstrate his newest addition to the Stark Industries arsenal, the Jericho Missile. After a very impressive demonstration, while heading back to the airbase, his convoy gets ambushed and he is taken hostage by insurgents, who want to force him to build them one of his new missiles. Instead, he uses the time to build a primitive suit of armor which he uses to dispose of the bad guys and escape. The whole experience changes his outlook on his company’s business and he vows to change so his legacy is “more than just a body count.”

I’m not going to give away too much of the plot here, but suffice to say it is more than adequate for this type of movie. Downey, Jr. is perfectly cast as Tony Stark. Like Downey, Jr., Stark always has a sarcastic line ready fire as he goes through life, getting by mostly on charm and his intellect. I suspect a lot of people put up with him because of his intelligence. Jeff Bridges plays Obadiah Stane, a man who helped Tony’s father build Stark Enterprises into a huge business, and who now serves Tony, who later finds out that Stane is working against him. Gwyneth Paltrow is Virginia “Pepper” Potts, Stark’s long-time and loyal assistant and Terrence Howard is James Rhodes, Stark Enterprise’s military liaison and good friend of Tony.

The special effects in this movie are fantastic, especially the flying sequences and the depiction of Tony’s computer interfaces. Lots of what is seen could easily be possible in the not-too-distant future. The best scenes are probably of Tony working in his basement lab testing and building the components of his suit of armor. These scenes incorporate a lot of humor without being silly, which can be hard to do in a film like this.

I highly anticipated this movie ever since I heard it was finally being a couple of years ago, and I was completely satisfied with the result. It isn’t perfect (at one point, Potts pulls the magnet which prevents shrapnel from piercing Tony’s heart out of his chest and never puts it back, but nothing happens to Tony), but overall it’s excellent. This movie is obviously written with a sequel or two in mind (the main cast has already been signed for two more movies), so we can look for ward to more of these stories. I, for one, am glad about that.

I’ll give it four and a half out of five kidneys. - 1/2

UPDATE: Friday night on Jimmy Kimmel’s show, Terence Howard made two comments that should make Iron Man fans extremely happy. First, he said that in the upcoming second film, he will be donning some armor and flying around. Second, he said that he will don the War Machine armor and eventually have a one-on-one battle with Iron Man. In fact, he said he had already seen the War Machine suit and that it looks great.

This entry was posted on Friday, May 2nd, 2008 at 4:37 pm by Nick, and is filed under Entertainment. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.