Boys With Toys

Iron Man is practically the anti Spiderman. Where Spiderman was about a brainy kid who struggles to keep a job, pay his bills, and discovers his newfound superpowers, while trying to woo the girl next door, Tony Stark, aka, Ironman, is Marvel Comic's answer to Batman.

Like Batman's Bruce Wayne, Tony Stark is a wealthy industrialist whose company sells weapons to governments, including his own. Unlike Bruce Wayne, whose motivation is vengeance for the death of his parents, the origin story of Tony Stark isn't quite the same. Indeed, this film decides to take a modern twist on the origin story.

In this case, Tony Stark is held hostage by a terrorist group. But in this modern day of PC, it's not a good idea to demonize all people with brown skin. In this case, he is held prisoner with a middle Eastern fellow who has been educated in the west, and is willing to sacrifice himself so Tony Stark can see what his vision has done.

When I first heard that Robert Downey Jr. had been cast to play Tony Stark, I didn't really see him as the superhero type. However, Downey is such a versatile actor, that he can play the drunken playboy at one moment, yet be a believable remorseful person the next, and even convince you that, yes, he's an engineer.

Of the superhero movies to have come out, Ironman seems the lightest, playing up comedic bits far more readily than say Spiderman or the vastly darker Batman. And much like Spiderman, Ironman's Tony Stark realizes that the woman of his dreams has been working for him all along, the efficient Pepper Potts, played by Gweneth Paltrow.

Ultimately, it's these smaller bits, rather than the Obadiah Stane story (which gets rather comical towards the end, being a bit too cartoony) that make Ironman. What these Marvel movies do is to not focus on the teenage comic fanboy view, but to have something the women can get into as well, whether it be the relationship of Peter and Mary Jane, or between Tony Stark and Pepper Potts.

Jon Favreau, the director, gets to the root of what you want a fabulously rich man to have. Toys. And lots of it. From fast cars, to the Iron Man outfits, to artificially intelligent robots, Favreau presents a nearly fetishistic obsession with technology, but he balances this with humor throughout, which means that Downey, far from being a bad casting decision, seems the perfect choice.

Favreau, like Spielberg, also employs grossness to get reactions from the audience, from a tube inside Downey's nose that seems way too long, to Paltrow reaching inside Downey to pull a mechanism out.

By pulling together so many elements, Favreau presents an Iron Man that's a lot of fun, even if it isn't particularly deep. It lacks some of the emotional resonance or the satisfaction of a Pixar film, which, to be fair, often take years to craft, but is still a pretty good yarn for the start of the summer blockbuster season.