“I’m work­ing on some­thing big.”

The last thing you’d think the world needs is another comic book movie fran­chise, and yet Jon Favreau’s Iron Man breathes fresh air into an oth­er­wise stale sum­mer block­buster sea­son. It has all the sta­ples of a big sum­mer hit (star power; grade A spe­cial effects; built in rock anthem) but it does feel, even if only in the tini­est way, that some­thing like the comic book genre in large part has been rethought, and not a moment too soon.

The sum­mer of 2007, the most suc­cess­ful on record, was rid­dled with sequels that helped solid­ify the stu­dios’ ridicu­lous haul to the bank. The pow­ers that be knew there would be only one way to come close to mak­ing ludi­crous amounts of money this sum­mer with nary a three­quel in sight: go back to the draw­ing board and start up great new fran­chises. Iron Man is the first taste we have of this new sea­son of grass-roots hero­ism, and it is a scorcher of a first look.

Let’s start with the on-again-off-again star of the pic, Robert Downey Jr. After lay­ing low as a lead­ing man for some time, he comes back to cen­ter stage with the full pack­age of sexy star­dom ooz­ing off his brow. As is becom­ing the grow­ing trend (see I Am Legend, Michael Clayton et al), gone is the youth­ful wide-eyed opti­mist weigh­ing his deci­sion to uti­lize ephemeral pow­ers for the sake of the com­mon good. Instead, Mr. Downey Jr. endows Tony Stark, the wun­derkind of mod­ern weaponry, with a liquored up bravado, an unapolo­getic com­pla­cency and ancil­lary under­stand­ing of the finer things in life (when asked if he’d buy an over­priced Jackson Pollack paint­ing, he responds “I need it. Buy it. Store it.”). In other words, long ago, Mr. Stark found a way to fend off Jiminy Cricket and he has never looked back, which is what makes his story so com­pelling. Rather than watch­ing the staid mak­ing of a hero, we actu­ally wit­ness the un-making of an anti-hero.

After his con­voy in Afghanistan is hit by weapons his own com­pany cre­ated, Mr. Stark is saved by fel­low solder-iron geek and “Taliban” pris­oner, Yansin, whose quick fix for shrap­nel embed­ded in Tony’s blood­stream leaves our pro­tag­o­nist with a bat­tery pow­ered elec­tro­mag­net in his chest. Forced to builld his lat­est weapon for a fill-in-the-blank Arab ter­ror­ist group, Stark sets to work on a suit of armor, pow­ered by a gen­er­a­tor he invented to run his heart. Far-fetched, yes, but when you’re in the moment it feels real enough. The rest should be obvi­ous to any film goer: boy escapes, boy finds pur­pose in life, boy builds most pow­er­ful flight suit in the world, boy finds girl to equal out the harsh emo­tional whiplash a hero has to live with.

Gwyneth Paltrow pro­vides a lit­tle bit of romance for our con­fused hero. As his adorably named assis­tant, Pepper Potts, she has spent much of her career as his per­sonal assis­tant. Only after his return from Afghanistan does their rela­tion­ship become extra per­sonal. Ms. Paltrow doesn’t wear bitchy-organized-sweet red­head so well, but she is ser­vice­able as the bal­anc­ing fac­tor in Stark’s life, even if the two lack the chem­istry of his light-powered  arc-engine chest.

Adding to the mix is the “Bic”-ed Jeff Bridges, whose Obadiah Stain is all the more for­mi­da­ble for his Grizzly Adams charm. Though I would have pre­ferred to delve deeper into this father-figure-cum-villain, his abil­ity to keep this char­ac­ter flow­ing from evil to friendly and back again makes him feel so damn scary. We know that he will stop at noth­ing to get his way, which is, uhhh, to have tons of money? To clear this up, Obadiah is dou­ble deal­ing Stark weapons to ene­mies of the U.S. A com­mit­ted war prof­i­teer and Machiavelli wannabe, he believes that the more he can keep the bal­ance of death and destruc­tion across the planet, the more peo­ple will be buy­ing his weaponry.

Save for Charlie Wilson’s War, this is one of the only films that intel­lec­tu­al­izes the cur­rent state of the world and actu­ally gets peo­ple to the the­aters to see it. Like Mike Nichols’ Christmas hit, Iron Man shows the rav­ages of war on the com­mon man in the third world. This is not just a hero who will save the buxom babe at a bank rob­bery or lit­tle timmy from an oncom­ing sub­way; Mr. Stark finds him­self com­pelled to actu­ally stop ter­ror­ists where they live in an effort to stem the ille­gal arms sales his com­pany has been comit­ting. While it never loses it’s flair for the tongue-in-cheek while trav­es­ing the moun­tain­ous Afghani deserts, the film pro­vides to fairly gut-wrenching scenes of ter­ror­ism at work. As with Obadiah, our vil­lain­ous Arab bad­dies are under­de­vel­oped in their thirst for blood. Their leader, a younger, shinier, clean-shaven answer to Osama bin Laden, speaks eng­lish as though he were edu­cated at Cambridge and has the wit to back it up, but his moti­va­tion to kill is never quite clear. No mat­ter really, for it is not his story.

Mr. Favreau has come a long way since he directed the fam­ily hit Elf. He has hit a groove with this block­buster, and audi­ences have opened their check­books to thank him. It stays true to comic lore with­out delv­ing too deep into the emo­tional abyss of its char­ac­ters’ souls a la Ang Lee’s Hulk. A great way to start off the sum­mer of 2008…it’s going to be a doozy!