Release Date:  May 2, 2008

Rating:  PG-13 (for some intense sequences of sci-fi action and violence, and brief suggestive content)

Genre:  Action-Adventure/Science Fiction

Run Time:  126 min.

Director:  Jon Favreau

Actors:  Robert Downey Jr., Jeff Bridges, Gwyneth Paltrow, Terrence Howard, Leslie Bibb, Shaun Toub, Faran Tahir

The whoops and hollers that greeted the introduction of the title character of Iron Man, the latest Marvel Comics character to make it to the big screen, during a preview screening of the film indicate that the flesh-and-blood actors who portray the characters are merely a sideshow for the Main Event.

The audience’s squeals upon the first full look at Iron Man, well into the film’s running time, were a resounding signal as to what the audience had come to see—not Robert Downey Jr. as Tony Stark, who builds the suit that turns him into Iron Man; not a bald, bearded Jeff Bridges as Stark’s business partner and the story’s villain; and not Gwyneth Paltrow as Starks’ loyal assistant. No, this man of steel—“titanium alloy” Stark specifies—is the star of the show, a mechanical, emotionless hulk that metes out justice upon the story’s bad guys.

We’ve seen this sort of robotic action hero before. Think of Peter Weller, who became Robocop, although Iron Man has a higher purpose than mere vigilantism. He’s a weapons manufacturer whose awakened conscience leads him to question his company’s mission and to take on rogue elements abroad.

Possibly the start of a film franchise, Iron Man shows some promise but is held back by retrograde attitudes about male/female relationships, some pacing problems, and a story that relies on special effects that don’t come across as all that special.

Stark, christened the “merchant of death” by his adversaries, heads Stark Industries with partner Obadiah Stane (Bridges), but his technical genius is matched by an oversized appetite for women and liquor. (Stark succumbs to alcoholism in the Iron Man comic books, but this early film installment only winks at his boozing.) He flirts outrageously with women, has his own entourage of pole dancers on his private jet, and responds to a feisty reporter’s questions by propositioning her. (The two are shown wrestling each other’s clothes off in bed in the very next scene.) These attitudes toward gender roles are more befitting the era of Iron Man’s debut—1963—than new-millennium ideas of equality of the sexes, but the film’s retro views are front-loaded and easy to overlook in the buildup to the story’s main event:  the unleashing of Iron Man.