MOVIE REVIEW: 'Iron Man'

By ROBERT W. BUTLER
The Kansas City Star

For its first 40 minutes, "Iron Man" isn't just a good superhero movie.

It's a good movie.

In fact, it's at its best before it becomes a superhero movie.

The pairing of director Jon Favreau and star Robert Downey Jr. has resulted in a comic-book flick that initially plays like serious drama.

"Iron Man" is one of Marvel's lesser-known characters, and the lack of familiarity may actually ease a viewer's way into this surprisingly smart effort.

As the picture starts, billionaire inventor/playboy/international arms dealer Tony Stark (Downey) is sitting in the back of a heavily armored Humvee zipping across the Afghan countryside.

Instead of battle gear he's wearing a $5,000 suit and clutching a highball made, no doubt, of some impossibly expensive spirit. Tony's obvious wealth and power _ and the fact that he has just successfully demonstrated for the military brass a terrifyingly deadly new weapons system _ clearly intimidates the uniformed soldiers who are his bodyguards.

The kid to Tony's left can't even bring himself to make eye contact with this testosterone-fueled mover and shaker.

But Tony is a master schmoozer. With a few well-placed comments he softens up his companions, presents himself as a good old fellow, makes a perfunctory pass at the woman soldier behind the wheel and changes the mood. It's not like he really cares about these grunts, but the silence irritates him.

Then the convoy is hit by rocket-propelled grenades. His companions down and his vehicle aflame, a shaken Tony stumbles out and crouches in fear, noticing that a fragment of the shell that hit them still bears the logo of Stark Industries. He's been brought down by one of his own toys.

For the most of the film's first hour the screenplay (it's credited to four writers) gives us a surprisingly nuanced origins story.

Tony awakens deep in a cave with some sort of metallic device imbedded in his chest. His sole companion and fellow prisoner, Yinsen (Shaun Toub), explains that Tony's is riddled with metal fragments from one of his own bombs. Yinsen, a physician who lost his family to the same terrorists who now hold them prisoner, has fashioned a battery-powered magnet that keeps the shrapnel from fatally working its way into Tony's heart.

Their captors, led by Raza (Faran Tahir), expect Tony to build them a weapon that will give them regional superiority. Instead the inventor and Yinsen surreptitiously fashion a metal suit that will allow Tony to fight his way to freedom.

What's remarkable about this passage are the emotions established in spite of the high-tech eye candy. Downey and Toub (a British-reared actor of Iranian heritage _ you'll recognize him from "Crash" and "The Kite Runner") portray two utterly different characters _ one so smugly privileged he's never had to face life at its rawest, the other a common man who has retained his decency despite agonizing travails.

Without belaboring the point "Iron Man" delineates Tony's crisis of conscience and his quiet assuming of Yinsen's almost zen-like state of open humanity. There's also some guilt involved, since the terrorists used weapons made by Stark Industries to kill Yinsen's wife and children.

In any case, the pairing of Downey and Toub makes for one of the more satisfying relationships ever seen in a superhero movie. It's hard to think of another actor who could match Downey's ability to so convincingly portray a man mutating from the smarmy to the altruistic.

Once Tony has returned to his old life and begun tinkering with an advanced suit of armor that will allow him to fly, keep him impervious to bullets and provide him with super strength, "Iron Man" becomes more of a conventional superhero movie.

Tony's newfound humanistic impulses don't play well with the board of Stark Industries, especially co-founder Obadiah Stane (a bearded, bald Jeff Bridges), who appropriates Tony's new technology to build an even bigger, nastier metallic ectoskeleton.

Yep, there's a smackdown comin'.

There's a second relationship in Iron Man worth mentioning. Tony's Girl Friday, improbably named Pepper Potts, is played by an uncredited Gwyneth Paltrow. Pepper has long tolerated her boss as a sort of genius 10-year-old, but now finds herself attracted to the more mature Tony. The film suggests a possible love story without really getting into it _ no doubt that will be explored if there are sequels.

Ditto for Terrence Howard's performance as Jim Rhodes, a military man who is Stark Industries' liaison to the Pentagon. Howard doesn't get to do much here, but Iron Man fans inform me his role grows as the saga continues.

The visual effects are first-rate and the scenes of Stark's trial-and-error construction of his body armor are both amusing and believable.

If by film's end "Iron Man" more closely resembles "The Transformers Movie" than "Masterpiece Theatre," it remains a largely satisfying summer entertainment blending brains and geekiness in equal measure.

___

3 stars

Director: Jon Favreau

Cast: Robert Downey Jr., Gwyneth Paltrow, Jeff Bridges, Terrence Howard

Rated: PG-13 for sexual innuendo and drug references.

Running time: 1:40