Iron Man

Our Review

The one that started the whole machine still plays better than most of what followed it. Robert Downey Jr. walks into Tony Stark with a standup comic’s timing and a memoir’s worth of damage, and the franchise was cast in a single afternoon. Jon Favreau keeps the first hour loose and funny: the ambush, the cave, the suit built in pieces, the cheeseburger order after the rescue. It is a star vehicle that happens to be a superhero movie.

The craft holds up too. The suit CG has weight because the movie spends so much time watching Tony build and test it, and the practical Afghanistan sets keep the middle stretch grounded. Jeff Bridges makes Obadiah Stane a believable corporate snake, a mentor who was always going to cash the founder out. Gwyneth Paltrow’s Pepper Potts gets more to do here than in most of the sequels that followed.

The weakness is the finale. Stane’s Iron Monger arrives late and the fight is a blurry pile of metal, the one place the budget shows. It hardly matters. The last beat, Tony leaning into the cameras to say “I am Iron Man,” set the tone for everything Marvel did for the next decade.

Watch it for the performance that built a universe. Our score: 8/10, and the rewatch value is high.