The Cinema of the Four

Iron Man

When you took away the colorful personality of my great-grandfather, Mr. Sherlock Holmes, when you stripped away his addictive character flaws, when you peeled away the fame, the mysteries, and all the other parts that made up the legend, what you had left was simply this . . . a skilled man of science. A genius who pulled off something no man had done before.

In that, I think he woud have found a great kinship with Mr. Tony Stark, the central figure in this week’s movie investigation, “Iron Man.” Played with marvvelous verve by actor Robert Downey, Jr. whose own past has certain Holmes elements to it, Tony Stark is a man of science and the sort of genius who can come up with a breakthrough technology while trapped as a P.O.W. in a cave. Based on a comic book story first told in the 1960s, this modern version replaces Viet Nam with that timeless place of war, Afghanistan, and gives us a relevant sort of superhero that makes even the very-successful “Spiderman” movies look a little shallow. In fact, this superhero movie shows a maturity level that lets you know that these things aren’t just for kids any more. Jon Favreau directing? Gynneth Paltrow and Terrence Howard backing up Downey in the cast? (To say nothing of Jeff Bridges’s fabulous turn as Obadiah Stane, the sort of name which says it all.) This case takes us to some exalted circles, Watson!

The very fantastic concept of a high-tech suit of armor giving us a “Knight Rider” without the car, a “Blue Thunder” without the helicopter, a “Street Hawk” without the motorcycle, is worked out in a fashion that, although fantastic, makes it digestibly fantastic. Sure, Iron Man takes some hits that no human body could survive with only an inch or two of machine to protect him, but there has to be some small suspension of disbelief in any fantasy, and “Iron Man” gives you just enough pseudo-science and a fast enough pace that any doubts are freely allowed to blow away in Iron Man’s supersonic wake.