Collective Rating: 4 / 5 Iron Helmets

Comments: Great summer moviegoing fare, and the best superhero movie since the first SpiderMan. The only part I didn’t love was the big fight at the end.

*Addendum - I must correct myself. As MrHattyHat astutely pointed out, I forgot about Batman Begins, which was far and away the best superhero movie ever. My bad.

Comments: Though I thoroughly enjoyed the Iron Man experience, I did so mostly because my expectations for it were quite low. That’s not to say it wasn’t a lot of fun, and Robert Downey, Jr. played the Tony Stark character to its sardonic hilt (at least according to my limited understanding of the original comic book character), but I was far less enthused by this than, say, Batman Begins–the gold standard for comic books movies, in my opinion. On that point I’ll disagree with MtyThor: I think it was better than Spider-Man (which I thought was kind of blah), but didn’t hold a candle to Christopher Nolan’s telling of the origin of the Dark Knight (not to be confused with the as yet unreleased Dark Knight film…review forthcoming).

 

Props to Jon Favreau for a successful introduction into the world of action film direction. It wasn’t a turn of genius, but passable and worthy of follow up efforts.

All in all, definitely worth a see, though so I’ll echo MtyThor’s overall rating: