Review Of IRON MAN

When a movie starts off with loud, pulsing rock music, you pretty much know what to expect from it. Jon Favreau did say that he wanted to make a rock'n'roll kind of movie, so here you have it, a piece of lite popcorn summer entertainment that has all the right ingredients for a money-generating overload at the box-office.

Iron Man's got exciting action, the right amount of humour and oodles of fun. But somehow, it feels to me like everything in it is a calculated move, as if Favreau and gang decided to leave nothing to chance. Like I said, there's the rock music to get the adrenaline flowing right before an action sequence, there are slapstick moments and one-liners to lighten some bits, and the slow, deliberate build-up to the One Big Moment when Tony Stark finally dons the titanium suit in its full glory. It's all designed to a tee, and nothing feels particularly risky.

That said, Iron Man is really The Robert Downey Jr Show. Without him, the movie would be just another typical superhero picture. As far as effects go, there's nothing particularly awe-inspiring - in short, nothing we haven't seen before or not come to expect. Downey just oozes charisma and charm in every scene, and he practically carries the movie all on his own. The rest of the cast feel like scenery. They could just stand there behind Downey and do nothing, and we'd still have a movie to see.

In the movie, Tony Stark, the playboy millionaire of a weapons-manufacturing enterprise, becomes a changed man after he's kidnapped by Afghan insurgents and seen the mass destruction his weapons have wrought. He develops a conscience, and decides to stop making stuff that blow up and kill people. So after he gets home, he builds the Iron Man suit, goes back to Afghanistan, and, er, blows up and kills the insurgents. So much for conscience, eh?

While the movie's politics is terribly muddled, it really isn't that sort of movie to make big statements about war and capitalism and such, although some moments of it are there only to serve its ideology of the fantastical. Heck, like I said, this is popcorn lite. Its fantasy world is one where the whole problem in Afghanistan isn't about past allies becoming current enemies. The root of the problem, in the end, can be traced to One Bad Guy. Not world politics,not hegemony, not empire. Just One Bad Guy. And it's that guy who gets into a big finale brawl with Iron Dude in a Robot Mayhem Smackdown that would get the 14-year-olds in the audience to sit up and cheer.

Really, this is a movie that isn't terribly concerned with trying on some striking originality nor with creating complex characters and a mature take on superheroes, a la Batman Begins. It just wants to entertain, and for a broad section of audiences, I think it will work.