Karnataka   

Cast-iron entertainment

Iron Man (English)

Cast: Robert Downey Jr., Terrence Howard, Gwyneth Paltrow, Jeff Bridges, Shaun Toub, Leslie Bibb, Bill Smitrovich and Nazanin Boniadi

Director: Jon Favreau

 Here comes a super smart superhero film. The film delivers the requisite bang for your buck with great balls of fire and the rest of it, but there is also an intelligent script and super cool acting starting with the brilliantly charismatic Robert Downey Jr. who, at 43, plays the title character with grace, edginess and vulnerability.

Tony Stark is the impossibly handsome, multi-billionaire playboy heir of a successful weapons manufacturing concern, Stark Industries.

The movie opens with a charismatic Stark bumping away in the back of a “humvee” in Afghanistan for a demonstration of his latest weapons system.

With a glass of scotch on the rocks, Stark holds forth to the U.S. soldiers who watch him with shock and awe.

Things immediately go terribly wrong and Stark is kidnapped by Hindi-speaking terrorists who demand he make them a bomb.

Instead, with his heart attached to a car battery, he designs an iron suit and blasts himself out of trouble.

Back in the States, Stark has a change of heart and decides to stop making weapons.

Stocks plummet and Stark’s mentor, Obadiah Stane, tries to do damage control. Stark builds another iron suit and with the help of his military friend, Rhodey, and super-efficient secretary, Pepper Potts, goes about saving the world.

Iron Man is a different superhero film in so many ways — from the palate, which forsakes the gloom of Gotham for a bright airy look; to the angsty psychobabble that is a superhero staple these days giving way to an acute character study and the superhero gaining his power from acumen and intellect rather than by a bite from a radioactive spider. The original Marvel character was created in the 1960s and the updating is smooth and effective.

The cast is wonderful. The statuesque Gwyneth Paltrow has traded mommy sweatpants for pencil skirts and high heels as Pepper while Jeff Bridges is glorious as distractingly bald Obadiah Stane. Terrence Howard looks slightly lost as Rhodey but gamely follows the superhero side-kick rule book.

The effects are stupendous but this is a movie, where you would remember them as only one of the many delicious treats.

Mini Anthikad-Chhibber

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