Iron Man: Super Hero With a Swinger's Soul!

There's something infinitely cool about Iron Man, the new Paramount action adventure based on a Marvel comic. Robustly directed by Jon Favreau with a wonderful performance by Robert Downey Jr. in the lead, it's a superhero movie with a "swinger's" soul. Downey Jr. plays the brilliant billionaire Tony Stark, who designs sophisticated weapons for the U.S. Army. He is abducted in Afghanistan and kept in a cave and forced to design rockets for a crazed warlord.

Instead, he fashions an invincible suit of armor to escape in which he modifies back at home into a super-charged flying body suit. Jeff Bridges (in full bald Daddy Warbucks mode) plays the weapons manufacturing executive who flips out when Tony Stark comes back from his capture (a changed man) and decides to stop making weapons of mass destruction only to have them fall into the hands of terrorists. Gwyneth Paltrow gives a lovely turn as Stark's devoted assistant Pepper, and the always great Terrence Howard plays Stark's military buddy. When the Iron Man cartoon was first conceived in the early 1960s the villains were the Viet Cong. This Afghan update is a surprisingly prescient and almost cartoonishly heroic in the end results. It's a bit of a relief after sitting through Standard Operating Procedure. Robert Downey Jr. has the nice ability of seemingly throwing away his lines in such an offhand manner but making them count somehow. And the whole film is a whole lot of fun -- the action scenes bring up fond memories of Robocop and The Iron Giant. And the witty hipster sheen makes it all go down nicely.