Straight to DVD

Iron Man

I think I'd assumed that life with two kids wouldn't be so different from life with one, at least in terms of my movie-watching habits. Wrong again: Both Whitney and I have been setting new personal bests in exhaustion lately. (We were warned, but we didn't listen....) And there's been a corresponding change in our definition of the term Queue Blocker—one we pray is temporary but disregard at our peril. We need action, and lots of it, to avoid awakening on the sofa as the end credits roll, having been conscious only for the opening ones.

The problem is that we're not natural action-movie fans—faced with some of the genre's less successful entries, we'd just as soon get a little extra sleep instead. Still, wishful thinking has now taken hold, and even the slightest sign that an action flick might be appealing is enough to get it to the top of our queue. So we leapt at Iron Man, which had something for both of us: comic-book provenance (for me, since Marvel provided the soap operas of tween-age boys of my generation) and Robert Downey Jr. (for Whitney, who's long been a fan).

Iron Man is another of the recent big-budget adaptations of classic superhero comics, and as such, it doesn't hold a ton of surprises. Downey plays Tony Stark, a genius playboy who heads up his family's massive armaments company. Stark is living a fast, dissolute life worthy of, well, Robert Downey Jr., until he's attacked and kidnapped by terrorists while in Afghanistan to sell the U.S. military on his firm's latest missile.

The terrorist leader says he'll spare Stark's life if he makes the missile for him instead, and sets him up with a crude-yet-somehow-still-state-of-the-art technical lab in an Afghanistan cave, replete with a fellow-captive assistant, Yinsen (Shaun Toub). Stark uses these resources instead to build a method of escape for himself, adding onto the concept of a Pacemaker-like gizmo Yinsen has created to prevent shrapnel that's still in Stark's body from lodging in his heart and killing him. (Or something like that. This is one of those plot points you just gotta go with.)

The result is a hulking metal suit that allows Stark to fly and blow stuff up, inside which he escapes from captivity (Yinsen, you'll be shocked to learn, doesn't make it). On his return home, however, he discovers that his partner and mentor, Obadiah Stane (a wonderfully menacing Jeff Bridges, using his physical size to great effect), has not only been selling Stark weapons to the very terrorists who had been holding him, but may have had a hand in the attack on him. With the help of his indispensable personal assistant, Pepper Potts (Gwyneth Paltrow—and yeah, the character name is another thing you should just go with), Stark hones and upgrades the Iron Man suit, then attempts to stop Stane and the terrorists from doing ... whatever it is they're trying to do. (World domination, I imagine.)

In other words, it's all pretty much by the numbers. To his credit, though, director Jon Favreau (who's quickly become the closest thing we have nowadays to an old-time studio director) doesn't make any bones about that, choosing to just execute the story as smartly and crisply as he can, and never wasting much time explaining the unexplainable.

Still, I'm not sure the result would be terribly satisfying were it not for Downey, who is, in a word—it's hard to imagine anyone else playing this role now. His charisma is electric: No matter what he's doing—chatting up U.S. soldiers in a Humvee, talking Pepper through a risky repair of his heart gizmo, even just bantering with his robot assistants as he works on the Iron Man suit—he's impossible not to like and very, very funny. (In other words, he's the perfect comic-book superhero.) And so he's able to elevate Iron Man's basic material to an implausibly enjoyable level, one even the movie's other actors—especially Paltrow and Terrence Howard, as Stark's U.S. Army liaison—clearly appreciate.

Yes, there's an awful lot of implausibility going on in Iron Man. And unlike most of the other good action franchises of the day—the latest incarnations of both James Bond and Batman, to name two—there's no attempt at serious explorations of character or morality, either. But by letting their insanely charismatic lead actor work and generally staying out of the way, Favreau and his team of screenwriters have accomplished something deceptively difficult: They've made a clean, crisp action movie that's a lot of fun to watch. Which is exactly what Whitney and I needed.