AyyRon Man I like it

I watched this film last week and it is very great. Surviving his own private Afghanistan hostage drama, billionaire industrialist Tony Stark returns home, as he terms it, "conflicted." You could say the same about "Iron Man," in which a war profiteer develops a conscience, an off-and-on politicized streak as well as a titanium alloy flying suit, with jets of flame shooting out of his palms.

As big-budget comic book adaptations go, this one's a gratifying freak—the right kind of conflicted, as well as quick-witted. It's a lot of fun. The style may be in the performances more than in the film itself, directed by Jon Favreau ("Elf," "Zathura: A Space Adventure"). But Favreau's picture, rumored to have cost $180 million, doesn't look, feel or play like a heavy-spirited blockbuster.

Mainly it has Robert Downey Jr. The newly insurable actor, who has had his run-ins with various chemicals in the past, plays this louche playboy with a knowing glint in his eye. You swear you can see that glint even when Stark's head is stuck inside the red-and-gold helmet with the slits for peepholes. And when he bandies the badinage about with Gwyneth Paltrow, who plays Stark's gal Friday, Virginia "Pepper" Potts, you're seeing two actors who understand each other completely, who can mine the pulp fictions at hand for both earnestness and laughs. Has there ever been a comic book movie with such high-comic fizz in the dialogue scenes?