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"This isn't the worst thing you've caught me doing."
Drunken, sleazy, skeevy weapons manufacturer Tony Stark (Robert Downey Jr) is a egomaniacal jerk. He treats people like trash and his private jet has a built in stripper pole. But when he's ambushed by some reel bad Arab types in Afghanistan, he undergoes a life changing experience. Held hostage in a cave and ordered to build a missile for his captors. Tony instead builds a suit of armour and escapes.
Once back in the USA, he decides to stop building weapons and instead he's going to build a bigger, better suit and blow things and people up personally. Quite how this will end weapons sales and warfare is never explained. After some hilarious mishaps where he flies into walls, falls through floors and ices up, he figures the tech out and Iron Man goes out being heroic. His co-worker Obadiah Stane (Jeff Bridges) takes exception to this and builds his own suit to beat the snot out of Tony. It's on and a new fascist, ass kicking superhero is born.
The SFX are good but not overwhelming, Downey makes Tony Stark an endearing character through sheer force of will, Bridges scares with his scary resemblance to Gerald McRaney, Gwyneth Paltrow and her starved little body is Stark's ill-named assistant Pepper Potts and Leslie Bibb ('Popular') is an annoying reporter and various hints, like the numerous references to S.H.I.E.L.D. set up the sequel. The film ends as Stark publicly announces his identity, so no secret identify shenanigans with him.
Memorable Moments:
This was an enjoyable superhero flick, the casting of Robert Downey Jr makes this movie. Single-handily he makes this film, if not for him this wouldn't have worked at all. Now my one major quibble with this film was that there was a post credits scene where Nick Fury, Director of S.H.I.E.L.D. recruits Tony to the Avengers Imitative, but I didn't get to see it as the end credits were like 10 minutes long and I couldn't wait that long even though I wanted to see that scene. Why couldn't they have pulled a 'Wild Things' and shown this scene about a minute into the end credits?
P-Con VI March 27th/28th/29th 2009
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