Iron Man Review

Favreau's real innovation was not the armor, it was the decision to let Robert Downey Jr. talk. Great stretches of this film are improvised, and Tony Stark's motormouth deflection gives a superhero origin something the genre almost never has, a lead who is genuinely funny on his own terms and genuinely unpleasant in ways the film does not rush to fix. The best sequence is the cave build, grease and scrap and a man learning to want something, and the second best is the Malibu workshop, where the comedy of failure does more character work than any speech could.

Matthew Libatique shoots the desert in bleached gold and the flight tests in clean high altitude blue, and the Mark II icing over at altitude is still the purest bit of engineering wonder the series has managed. The film falls apart in its last twenty minutes exactly as most of its successors would: Jeff Bridges is having fun but Obadiah Stane is a nothing villain, and the finale is two grey machines hitting each other in the dark beside a highway. What survives is the press conference, four words that made a decade of movies possible.