Issue 15

Dir Jon Favreau 2008. USA. 126 mins. PG. Robert Downey Jr, Terrence Howard, Jeff Bridges, Gwyneth Paltrow, Faran Tahir. 

Heavy comes free of charge with Iron Man, no matter what your frame of reference –Black Sabbath’s face-melting metal anthem or Marvel’s Cold War-spawned superhero. So it’s a sweet surprise that this long-awaited Hollywood version has lightness in mind. 

Paced swiftly by ex-Swinger Jon Favreau, the movie is blessed by motormouthed Robert Downey Jr as billionaire tech genius Tony Stark, an apolitical man with stripper poles on his private plane. Much was made of this ‘risky’ casting, but it pays off beautifully. Downey, already a walking comic strip, imparts crucial verve to Favreau’s static compositions; his glib Stark, launching smart bombs between sips of Scotch and busting out of Afghan terrorist captivity with a half-amused shrug, is dangerously appealing in a PJ O’Rourke way. 

Of course, Iron Man unfurls into the story of Stark’s reawakening: struck by conscience, he closes his arms factory – and for a giddy moment, you wonder if a studio movie might be taking on the whole of the military-industrial complex. (The overgrown geek then weaponises his body in a sequence of tests as fun as anything in RoboCop.) But here, actually, is the sole problem with the film: suddenly, it’s too conventional. It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to correctly identify Jeff Bridges’ bald co-exec as the Halliburtonian antagonist-to-be. 

But Iron Man is one blockbuster that can’t end with a typical mano a mano slugfest, no matter how roboticised and Transformers-like. We want planes, tanks, enraged Congressional speeches. Such is the promise of the character that you feel like the franchise will get there. (Many hints are planted.) Then we’ll really see some heavy.