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The Review - AT THE MOVIES with WILLIAM HALL
Published: 1 May 2008

Robert Downey Jnr and Gwyneth Paltrow in Iron Man.

Not just any old Iron Man!

IRON MAN
Directed by Jon Favreau
Certificate 12a

AND still they come! Will nothing stop the relentless march of the superhero, cutting a vapour trail through the sky as he proceeds to do his duty and save the planet?
Not as long as there’s an audience out there making the box office cash registers sing. So who am I to dare to suggest that it might all be getting just a teeny bit – well, boring?
That’s until this week.
Enter Iron Man, a lesser-known figure out of the Marvel Comics stable and based on the character devised by Stan Lee back in the 1960s.
Robert Downey Jnr plays inventor Tony Stark, weapons magnate (“and all-round genius”), whom we first meet in a cave in the Afghan mountains. He’s got a bag over his head and he’s holding out from a group of insurgents and their psychotic shaven-headed leader Raza (Faran Tahir) who behaves like Kojak after someone has stolen his lollipop.
Stark finally succumbs under torture, and agrees to build the ultimate missile. Instead he uses the materials to build an 8ft red and gold suit of armour that gives him phenomenal strength and makes him invulnerable.
Credulity is strained to breaking point – but for once it doesn’t matter.
Clumping around inside a claustrophobic suit of armour is surely no way to stay healthy – after all, someone’s only got to push you over and you lie helplessly on your back like a beetle. Witness the French knights at Agincourt, expiring en masse in the mud.
But Robert Downey Jnr is brilliantly believable as the ruthless tycoon forced to give up worrying about the profit-and-loss balance sheet of Stark Industries and take his true place in life as a saviour of the world.
The surprise is to find Gwyneth Paltrow as his long-suffering assistant with the unlikely name of Pepper Potts, while Terrence Howard adds gravitas as a military aide with his own secret agenda.
The action is terrific, particularly the early scenes where Iron Man takes shape – but in a cave! Where did Stark find the titaniatungstenite (I made that up, because I couldn’t understand a word of it) for the armour to withstand anything from bullets to warheads?
Does it make a shred of sense? No.
Does it matter? Not one jot.
Iron Man deserves to make squillions.

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