Superhero, On the Rocks, With a Twist

Iron Man is a profoundly stupid film, proving once and for all that intelligence and the ability to entertain are not mutually inclusive qualities. It has been lost on no critic that the movie functions best as a metaphor for its star's progress from dissolute wunderkind to lost soul and back to redeemed, respectable member of the Hollywood firmament. Accordingly, Robert Downey, Jr. is effortlessly brilliant as prodigy/arms merchant/playboy Tony Stark, making such an improbable character wholly believable and even empathetic; I imagine this how Bruce Wayne might have turned out if no one gunned down his parents. Speaking of which, like Christopher Nolan's Batman Begins, Iron Man is leaps and bounds more engrossing when focused on the alter ego and not the stunt double in the plastic unitard, and director Jon Favreau keeps the superhero content to a bare minimum: Iron Man is only on-screen and doing battle for about 15 of the film's 126 minute running time. Unlike Ang Lee's ponderous boring The Hulk, which had a similar hero-to-movie ratio, audiences here will not mind that the CGI-ified antics, which are Iron Man's low point, are squeezed to the margins: the final battle between Stark/Iron Man and his mentor/nemesis Obidiah Stane (played with bald-headed panache by a near-unrecognizable Jeff Bridges) is a complete snooze that leaves one to wonder if Iron Man's true superpower is the uncanny ability to rely on absurd dei ex machinis. Much of the film's first hour-and-change treads far too close to "ripped from the headlines" to be healthy for this air-puft confection - at least we substitute some weird neo-Genghis Khan clique for, you know, actual Islamist terrorists. Gwyneth Paltrow is effervescent as His-Girl-Friday Pepper Potts; Terrence Howard barely registers as I'm-Just-Here-For-the-Pay-Check friend/confidant Col. Jim Rhodes.