Iron Man

PICTURE the scene: King of the fairies Al Gore wakes up in the middle of the night sweating and screaming carbon neutrally about a terrible nightmare.

He remembers horrifying images of incredibly manly-looking machines run purely on ozone thinning fossil fuels and testosterone.

Turns out it was just Iron Man—the only superhero to watch An Inconvenient Truth and then promptly fireball the cinema to sound of loud electric guitar solos.

Then again, he's probably not alone in that idea.

The first of planned trilogy, Iron Man's an 'origins' story—in the same vein as Batman Begins—in more ways than one.

After all, it's the first true Marvel Studios picture and the first fully financed by those comic-book publishers-turned-entertainment mega house.

With north of $150 million resting on those broad gold and red shoulders, it represents a pretty risky way to kick-start a fledgling business.

Add to the mix a creative team who have never opened a summer blockbuster—despite several Oscar nods—it sounds like the workings of a studio in need of a Gordon Ramsey Kitchen Nightmare-style reality b******ing.

But this BIG gamble in going for talent over big-names has paid off big time, because Iron Man positively roars onto the screen and a new francise is born.

Billionaire-slash-playboy weapons manufacturer Tony Stark (Robert Downey Jr) is touring Afghanistan in the hope he can convince the US military to buy some of fancy-pants missiles.

Unfortunately for the goateed-Stark, the tour is ambushed and he's captured by a terrorist group who force him to build them the same missile for free.

Not the brightest bunch, these guys, luckily for Stark.

They only realise their 'missile' looks suspiciously like a giant killer robot with flame throwers for arms a few minutes before Stark climbs inside it, boots down the door and toasts them alive.

Still, it's one of those errors anyone could make on their first day of a new job.

On his return to the US, Stark promptly decides to right the wrongs made by the weapons his creates by creating, ahem, another weapon in the form of a more garish and powerful suit.

Did we forget to mention he also has some fatal shrapnel swimming around in his heart waiting to pounce and put an early end to his superhero-ing career?

Don't worry as he's built himself a nice little electromagnetic pacemaker powered by a mini-reactor from the odds and ends one usually finds hanging around a remote cave.

Logic aside, I can't remember too many people shaking their heads in sky-cursing anger when dinosaurs suddenly appeared in Jurassic Park.

Nor did anyone protest too much when Doc Emmett Brown uttered something from the ‘it just does travel in time' school of movie technology in Back To The Future?

And in the same way that both those particular films pushed the barriers of special effects, ILM's incredible photo-real work on Iron Man himself is utterly flawless.

In fact, it even builds on last year's Transformers in terms of getting the weight, power and look of heavy metal hardware just about perfect.

Fortunately for those wanting more than smash-bang-wallop in their popcorn film, the cast have also got it well sussed to create a suprisingly compelling and composed character piece.

Gwyneth Paltrow is perfect in the thankless archetype of the torch-holding and unfortunately-named secretary Pepper Potts, and shows real warmth and zing bantering against Downey Jr.

Jeff Bridges, too, shines as the bullish and hard-edged Obidiah Stane, even if he's the worst-kept secret-movie-bad-guy since Ian McDiarmid's Palpatine.

And in case you haven't guessed, the role of Stark fits Robert Downey Jr perfectly like a titanium-alloy, servo-assisted glove.

The back-from-the-brink actor veers nimbly between both the swaggering and sensitive sides of his character, never mistiming a brutally hilarious wisecrack.

The Comeback Man in more ways than one then.

However, the film is typical of origin stories like Batman Begins and X-Men in that it tragically suffers a serious case of OSS (Origin-Story-Syndrome).

Once Stark has his powers, the film runs out of steam and is unsure where to go. thus leaving the latter-half to quickly summon up and dispense with a token threat to test the hero's mettle.

The action sequences, too, also lack the certain punch of a summer blockbuster and feel a little wanting in their pay-offs, particularly the disappointing final battle.

That aside, the central performances director Jon Favreau pulls from his actors and the desire to see these characters develop in the next films more than makes-up for any short-comings.

Here's hoping Marvel keep their Iron Man on a one-villian-a-movie diet.

And yes, I'm talking to you Spider-Man.

Iron Man is now showing in cinemas worldwide.