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I have two words for you…

F-cking. Awesome. That’s my concise and completely accurate review of Iron Man.

We went to see the movie earlier this morning. I had been building myself up for this movie all week and had been anxiously awaiting it for the past couple months. I was in perfect position to have my hopes dashed, much like they were for the first Hulk film. It’s pretty hard for a film to live up to what a anxious movie go-er might imagine before they actually get to see the movie and usually I force myself to have lower expectations. For some reason I decided to let myself get excited about this film.

And I was not one bit disappointed. Not a single bit.

The movie had the normal phenomenal special effects. This day and age this is something that I expect from a film in this genre. That’s why I go to superhero films. I don’t go to see comic books I loved since I never read them. I go to see unreal things made real. I am honestly far more impressed with amazingly good animation effects in films like The Incredibles than am by appropriately shiny metal and wicked explosions in an action film. Iron Man was filled with plenty of good action shots of the man in the iconic metal suit doing lots of hero-ey stuff. The action wasn’t overbearing and it didn’t overwhelm the story.

The story was surprisingly good and very much so character driven. The genesis of the character has been changed to better reflect the times and still managed to keep the “war profiteer turned do-gooder” vibe that is in the genesis of the original comic. The names had that familiar comic book feel to them; short and descriptive. The hero is Stark, and so is his view of the world as a whole at the beginning. The peppy sidekick? Why Pepper, of course. Pepper Potts to be exact. Why, the name almost personifies a cute freckle-faced assistant. Just saying it makes you peppy. As a whole everything fit together as it should in these films. The production values were high and the writing punchy and surprisingly smart (especially between Pepper and Stark). The only negative I had was the butchering of the song Iron Man during the end credits. C’mon! Don’t screw with things that don’t need to be screwed with.

But this film had something special and his name is Robert Downey Jr.

Most of the superhero films these days have heroes that look like they belong in an episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer. They’re all perfect little people between the ages of 17 and 21, it seems. The recent Superman movie, though a film I enjoyed, suffered from this. Lois and Clark look like they just got their BA from some ivy-league mass-production preppy machine, not like they’re old enough to be established journalists; one of whom has won a Pulitzer. At the beginning, Downey brings his trademark sharp witted playboy to the fore, no doubt from years of practice in real life. It works marvelously. I ceased to see Downey pretending to be Stark and began to see the two as the same person.

But where Downey really shines as Stark is when the mood turns serious. Eighteen year old models don’t have weight (either physically or emotionally). When the story turns dark and you can begin to see the change come over the character, Downey’s age and lack of physical perfection lends him a sense of gravitas that the kids just haven’t been able to pull off yet. I believed he felt regret over what he’d created and how it had changed the world. This alone makes the film worth seeing. Add to this that his character wasn’t changed by some sort of magic bullet or cosmic radiation… that he *chose* to be better and to make the world a better place… and you have yourself something different and so much better than the normal super hero fare.

So my initial review stands. F-cking Awesome. Go. Now. Why aren’t you going?