So it’s easy to see what Hollywood sees in the character, but, somewhat surprisingly, it’s hard to resist the film that director Jon Favreau and his four-man screen-writing team have built around it. Iron Man stands atop the increasingly large heap of superhero movies; in fact, it may be the current king of that particular hill.
Credit goes largely to Robert Downey Jr., who plays Tony Stark, the ingenious sake-swilling, womanizing weapons-manufacturer playboy billionaire (picture young Howard Hughes as a modern celebrity CEO running Lockheed Martin). Downey is not only perfect for the role of bad boy trying to atone on a meta-level, but he has the wit, charm and hyperactive delivery to play a guy a few times smarter than everyone around him.
Favreau, who’s probably still best known as the “the guy who made Swingers,” seems to have learned from his last few family films (Elf, Zathura) how to properly balance character and story with set pieces and special effects, and the results are a crowd-pleasing movie in which the latter always serve the former. It’s a blockbuster with brains.
Part of what makes Iron Man work so well, however, is a matter mostly beyond the control of its makers—timing. Not only did film-making technology have to be where it is now to make the complex Iron Man suit and its million moving parts look cool and convincing instead of like, say, Robocop or one of the Terminator robots, but the whole concept of the film seems apropos of right now, and would have lacked impact had it come much earlier.
The comic book Iron Man debuted in the early ‘60s during the Cold War, when Tony Stark was captured in the jungles of Vietnam. This Iron Man is the product of the War on Terror, and while it’s too bad for the world at large that the first decade of this century has so much in common with the ‘60s, (geopolitically speaking), it sure helps Favreau’s film to encapsulate a certain aspect of the zeitgeist, making it feel like it’s a lot more than a charming actor wearing a toy that makes things blow up
