The first blockbuster of the new season originates, appropriately, in a comic book - yet another one of the popular, pretentious productions of Stan Lee's gang at Marvel. Whatever its merits, despite the credits' listing of four screenwriters (usually an ominous sign), "Iron Man" exhibits the simple plotting, the naive characterization, the immature emotional development, and the adolescent fantasy of its source. All of that watery content poured into a shiny vessel of the usual special effects, however, practically guarantees that the movie will shake the walls of the megaplexes across the land.

The picture chronicles an adventure in the life of Tony Stark (Robert Downey, Jr.), a sort of Bill Gates with attitude. A scientific genius and inventor whose father worked on the Manhattan Project, he applied his talents to the business of creating deadly weapons and, not incidentally, amassing billions of dollars. When not coming up with new ways of killing large numbers of people, he leads the good life - drinking expensive champagne, driving nifty sports cars, romancing beautiful women.

A traumatic experience in Afghanistan transforms Tony from death-dealing playboy to crusader for peace. While demonstrating a superweapon called Jericho that blows up whole mountain ranges, he finds himself the target of his own products when a band of guerrillas, presumably of the Taliban persuasion, equipped with a whole armory of Stark products, ambushes his Humvee. Captured by the guerrillas, he escapes by ingeniously fashioning a kind of self propelled suit of armor from scraps of material; having witnessed the consequences of his own inventions, the merchant of death now resolves to fight for peace.

Stark's decision inspires him to design a new, improved armor far more effective than his crude prototype, with all sorts of optional equipment, including jet propulsion and rocket launchers, which will enable him to accomplish that age-old mission of comic book superheroes, the defeat of megalomaniacs bent on conquering the world. As it turns out, that particular megalomaniac (Jeff Bridges) works as Stark's right-hand man and wants to thwart his boss's new-found nobility. With the help of the people who captured Stark, he tailors a bigger, stronger, meaner metal suit for himself, setting up the inevitable high-tech confrontation between two monumentally destructive machines.

That climactic combat employs all the now entirely predictable sci-fi special effects, which pretty much reach their peak in the usual battle of behemoths, not all that different from the great old days of Godzilla versus Mothra, or even King Kong dispatching a variety of prehistoric beasts. The two armored figures swoop and soar through the stratosphere, firing rockets back and forth, slugging it out like a couple of heavyweights, taunting each other in the hallowed comic book manner, and destroying a considerable amount of the landscape.

The real fun of the movie, possibly even for comic book fans, derives as much from the conception of the major characters as from those pyrotechnics. Robert Downey, Jr. handles an atypical part with a certain offhand panache, throwing away a dozen relatively clever lines and quips as if he were playing in a comedy instead of a juvenile action flick. The usually uninteresting Gwyneth Paltrow plays Pepper Potts, Stark's personal assistant, with a modicum of wit and a certain antiseptic sexiness. Jeff Bridges, sporting a bald pate and a quantity of chin fungus, in an unusual role as the bad guy, maintains a single, boring note throughout.

Probably the best part of the movie consists of what American filmmakers do better than anyone, the depiction of sheer process, in this case, Tony Stark's creation of his Iron Man outfit. The dazzling display of numerous computer screens popping up at his command, the various holographic images that allow him to tailor his suit, the directions that his machinery follows, even the graceful, balletic gestures with which he conjures up the magic of advanced technology provide far more visual excitement than all the familiar pyrotechnics. The sequence works so brilliantly that nothing else in the movie compares with it; unlike most of "Iron Man," you want it to keep going on and on.

Iron Man

(PG-13), directed by Jon Favreau

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