'Iron Man' has wit and heart

(A-) The ticklish fun of Iron Man comes from watching a happy cast in fighting trim make a concept that should sink like a lead dirigible do cartwheels on the ground and barrel-rolls in the sky.

Robert Downey Jr. plays Tony Stark, a munitions tycoon who learns the dangers of arms proliferation first-hand when he's kidnapped in Afghanistan and sees that his weapons are best-sellers in enemy territory. His insurgent captors order him to create a copy of his devastating Jericho missile system. He instead uses their stash of Stark Industries materiel to design a new-millennial armor that will allow him to fight and fly his way out of the bad guys' caves.

What ensues is a nifty series of satire-tinged riffs on our era's inconvenient truths. Once Stark returns to home base in Los Angeles, he decides to redirect his company from arms manufacturing into clean fuel with "Arc reactor" technology. It's the same technology that he uses to make his first suit of armor and then a super-duper variation that turns him into Iron Man, a Fantastic Four rolled into one. (In the original Marvel origin stories from the early 1960s, Stark found his calling in Vietnam, not Afghanistan, and also became a founding member of Marvel's other great team, the Avengers.)

The premise sounds prosaic, like an ultra-high-tech Batman without the neuroses and the creepy-cool bat imagery. Yet director Jon Favreau and two teams of screenwriters root Iron Man's high-flying derring-do in a change of heart that clicks first emotionally, then comedically, and ultimately in both ways.

In Afghanistan, a fellow prisoner, a surgeon, keeps Stark alive by inserting a magnetic-suspension system in his chest that deflects shrapnel headed to his atrial septum. Stark replaces that primitive device, connected to a car battery, with a glowing, Arc-reactor-based core.

If friends are the family you choose, this new core is the heart Stark makes for himself. He's no longer a brilliant yet feckless playboy heir to his trailblazing father. In Afghanistan, Tony Stark loses his hedonistic elan as well as the confidence that everything he builds is for the greater good.

But he gains a novel slant on life that makes him see everyone from a fresh angle, including three close associates: his right-hand gal Pepper Potts ( Gwyneth Paltrow), his business partner and surrogate father, Obadiah Stane ( Jeff Bridges), and the U.S. military's liaison with Stark Industries, James "Rhodey" Rhodes (Terrence Howard).

What gives the movie its high-altitude lift is that it plays these changes for humor as well as risk and pathos. The way Downey does Stark, he's as droll an existential quick-change artist as he was a libertine. Downey balances Stark's heartfelt statements about repurposing Stark Industries with his glee at entering a brave new world of personal commitment. When he puts his body and soul as well as his mind into the development of a super-suit, he's like a writer-director giddy over starring in his own creation.

Downey and Favreau and the special-effects team transform the trying-out of the armor and its powers into slapstick cadenzas. But equally entertaining is Stark's and Potts' recognition that they share more than a mere working chemistry. As she does when hosting Saturday Night Live, Paltrow seasons her poise with a relaxed and ready wit: She invests Potts with the delicious know-it-all quality that a super-competent underling can sometimes pull off with an all-powerful and appreciative boss.

Howard at least brings a few curves to a straight-arrow role and makes the most of his one running gag, an all-purpose explanation that Rhodes uses to cover up Stark's secrets. And Bridges offers an immense avuncular presence as Stane. If Downey embodies the slipperiness of quicksilver intelligence as Stark, Bridges provides the mysterious warmth of experience as Stane. With his trademark head of hair shaved, all the power in Bridges' face funnels into his eyes. They're as enigmatic as they are galvanizing.

As an action director - a ringmaster, really - Favreau toes the same line with his props as he does with his performers, keeping the emotions real while detonating laughs with sharp incongruities and exact yet unpredictable timing. The ultimate Iron Man costume is a beauty: There's an exotic whiff of the Orient and the medieval to the red-and-gold torso and limbs and the glittering bullet-headed mask. Favreau laces humorous hyperbole into the precision and force of the superhero's attacks. And when an even bigger-suited super-antagonist emerges in the form of the Iron Monger, the movie delivers a funny-scary clash of metallic titans.

Iron Man never falls into the trap of winking at the audience - the only thing "arch" about it is its villain - and it never seems overcalculated, either. It's a potential franchise-starter that plays like a frolicsome one-off. So far this spring, as far as live-action would-be blockbusters go, all that glitters is iron.

>>>IRON MAN ( Paramount) Starring Robert Downey Jr., Gwyneth Paltrow, Terrence Howard, Jeff Bridges. Directed by Jon Favreau. Rated PG-13 for some intense sequences of sci-fi action and violence, and brief suggestive content. Time 120 minutes.

michael.sragow@baltsun.com

Related topic galleries: Batman, Jeff Bridges, Jon Favreau, Heavy Engineering, Robert Downey Jr., Gwyneth Paltrow, Paramount

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