Word: starke
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...soars through the night sky, disrupts military aviation, wages holy war against those twin bastions of evil, terrorists and corporate bigwigs. He's Tony Stark (Robert Downey Jr.), zillionaire industrialist, and he arrives accompanied by the POW!, BANG! and KA-BOOM! suitable for a movie based on a comic book, but with lots more intelligence than the genre usually demands. It's Iron Man to the rescue, yanking movies and the worldwide box office out of its months-long doldrums and into the stratosphere...
...beginning of Iron Man - directed by Jon Favreau from a script by Mark Fergus, Hawk Ostby, Art Marcum and Matt Holloway - Tony Stark is nearly a cartoon villain, though he's drawn in the bold, confident strokes worthy of a '60s Marvel Comic cover by Jack Kirby. He has a Mephistophelean goatee and a glint in his eyes that suggests this former boy wonder is a genius at wasting his genius. He's a devoted practitioner of pride, lust and avarice, to name the fanciest of your deadly sins. This is a man who has got it all: wealth, power...
...Sons) and accounts for some of the evil-genius rep of Halliburton's gift to governance, Dick Cheney. In his first appearance in the March 1963 issue of Tales of Suspense, as written by Stan Lee and his brother Larry Lieber, and illustrated by Kirby and Don Heck, Stark was inspired by Howard Hughes in his Spruce Goose phase: titan of industry, crackerjack engineer-inventor, indefatigable wooer of Hollywood actresses. (Later in the decade he'd be transformed into a cool Cold Warrior, fighting the Commies in Vietnam.) In the movie he's more a Richard Branson figure: suave, sexy...
...Redemption. When Tony goes to an Afghanistan-like war zone to unveil a new weapon, his jeep is blown up, his team of escorts killed, and as he passes out he sees that the missile that did the damage came from Stark Industries. Severely wounded - and kept alive with a car battery wired to his heart - he comes to in the cave of Taliban-like insurgents, whose head-shaved leader (Faran Tahir) would very much appreciate it if Tony could confect a home-made bomb for him. Instead, with the help of a fellow prisoner (Shaun Toub), Tony constructs...
...saying that Iron Man (actually, as Tony says, "Gold-Titanium Alloy Man") is some gigantic Gandhi. Nonviolent resistance is a sanctified political strategy, but as the key to Act Three of a comic-book movie, it kinda sucks. For Stark, his cool new gadget is both a fun toy (he can fly inside it, attracting the attention of military planes) and a weapon (for the climactic face-off with Iron Monger, a larger version of Iron Man). These are the episodes, executed with plenty of technical panache, which will keep young eyes stuck on the screen this weekend. Kids will...