‘Iron Man’ rates as great comic book film

Friday, May 9, 2008

It’s amazing how imaginative and fun a comic book movie can be when the restraints of making it ‘‘easier to relate to” and ‘‘more realistic” are lifted and the directors and screenwriters make a faithful update of the source material.

‘‘Iron Man” arguably is the purest comic book to film translation and the result is a movie that hardcore comic book geeks and nonfans alike will enjoy and want to see over and over again.

Robert Downey Jr. (‘‘Charlie Bartlett”) gives a performance that will send his career soaring to the stratosphere as Tony Stark, a brilliant billionaire whose company specializes in arms dealing.

It’s not until he’s captured by a group of terrorists armed with the very weapons his company manufactures that Stark begins to rethink his views and a potential new hobby ... much more dangerous than bedding Maxim models.

Stark creates a metal suit to escape and, inspired by the experience, begins work on more streamlined versions to help those who cannot help themselves.

Screenwriters Mark Fergus, Hawk Ostby, Art Marcum and Matt Holloway get right away what makes Iron Man such a cool hero — he’s got an equally cool alter-ego. While Superman has to play a clumsy reporter and Spider-Man has to be a nerdy student, Tony Stark is a funny, likable genius, who has a stripper pole in his airplane. Bet Bruce Wayne doesn’t have that setup.

And Downey is a blast as he has the perfect flippant demeanor of a responsibility-impaired billionaire who finds that his golden life isn’t as sparkling as he imagined. It helps that he has such a stellar cast to work with, including Terrence Howard and Gwyneth Paltrow whose characters get significant screen time but have room to be expanded on for future films. Jeff Bridges’ Obadiah Stane might be a bit obvious as the main bad guy but it’s a minor gripe.

Director Jon Favreau (‘‘The Break-Up”) takes the typical superhero origin story and makes it fun for the audience, showing the literal construction of a superhero but keeping the story and characters so entertaining that you’re not waiting for Stark to finally become Iron Man. And even with its two-hour run time, Favreau has paced the film so well that there’s never a dull moment.

The Iron Man character wasn’t going to be made correctly unless the filmmaking techniques could match the complexity of the character. Favreau seems slightly influenced by Michael Bay’s ‘‘Transformers” — in a good way if that’s possible — in how Stark gets into his armor. Where Bay failed with Transformers, Favreau succeeds in getting the proper scope with the action scenes. You’re not trying to make out where Iron Man is, and with his bright colorful armor he doesn’t get lost in the shadows fighting it out with terrorists or even bigger metal machines.

There’s all kinds of nods to the comic fan, like the appearance of a certain government organization, Stark’s butler Jarvis and his ever-changing armor collection, but not done in a heavy-handed fashion as if to imply ‘‘see? We really are making a comic book movie here!”

One very cool note is that Downey will be reprising his Stark role in June’s ‘‘The Incredible Hulk,” harkening back to the days when it wasn’t rare to see Marvel Comics’ characters in each other’s books. While Edward Norton is sure to dazzle as Bruce Banner, I can’t wait just to see Downey’s Stark again.

My main gripe is that it points out how vastly inferior most comic books movies are as companies just try to make a quick buck off the new popular genre. If they all had the same attention to detail and actual care regarding the character, they might actually approach the level of ‘‘Iron Man,” a superior film that ranks alongside ‘‘Superman” and ‘‘Spider-Man” as one of the best the genre has to offer. Bring on the sequel!