Taking on corporate baddies
Ed West on Iron Man
2 May 2008

Tony Stark, played by Robert Downey Jr

The problem with comic book characters in films, as several commentators have pointed out, is that it takes so long to explain how they became super heroes. Whether it is Batman, Spider-man or the X-Men, the first two-thirds of the film are always spent dealing with how an ordinary human being ended up dressing up like a father's rights protestor.

So, by the time it comes to having an actual adventure, the film has run out of puff, leaving a few minutes for a token battle with the antagonist, who we see falling into a vat of acid or something similar. Film characters do not need an "origin", but for comic fans nothing is more important.

Marvel Comics' Iron Man first saw the light of day in 1963 and was originally an anti-Communist crusader, a latter-day version of the anti-Nazi Captain America, although he has since become progressively less gung-ho and, like all American superheroes, cripplingly introspective and doubt-ridden. Tony Stark, the man in the iron suit, is an eccentric millionaire industrialist with a taste for fast women and fast machines. His creator Stan Lee based the character on Howard Hughes, with a bit of Playboy's Hugh Hefner thrown in.

The film starts with Stark as a greedy plutocrat in Afghanistan, showing the American military how awesome his Stark Industry missiles are. Just as the triumphant lord of war is seen sipping a scotch on the rocks, his convoy is attacked; the next thing he knows is he's being held captive by "foreign fighters" - their ethnic origin, religion and/or politics is never quite explained. At one point Stark's fellow captive explains that the bad guys are speaking Hungarian, which appears to make zero sense.

Stark also has a serious shrapnel wound which would be fatal except that his fellow inmate, a good Afghan (read "noble and tragic ethnic"), has built some sort of magnetic device with healing powers. Now, this device is clearly central to the plot but neither I, nor anyone else who has not studied the comic book, will understand exactly what it does.

The bad guys, all standard thick Hollywood Arabs straight out of central casting (curiously, one of the lackeys credited only as "Ahmed" was played by a man called "Ahmed Ahmed"), order Stark to build them a weapon they can use against the Americans. Instead he creates an iron suit and punches his way out, even though his suit looks absolutely nothing like a missile and they're supposed to be watching him the whole time. The carefree plutocrat returns home with a newfound conscience and, realising that his weapons are being used for bad ends in Afghanistan, announces that he will shut down the arms-manufacturing division of his company.

This sets him on a path towards conflict with Obadiah Stane (played by Jeff Bridges and named after the Book of Obadiah, the shortest book in the Bible), the least surprising avuncular figure-turned-baddie in film history. While Stane tries to take over the company that Stark inherited from his father, our hero builds a suit of armour that he will use to right wrongs.

After 9/11 it was suggested that the time for superheroes had gone, since if the Twin Towers tragedy showed us anything it was that there was no Superman in real life. Now superhero films are directly addressing the terror issue, and the first heroic thing Iron Man does is rescue some hapless villagers from those notorious Hungarian terrorists. Except, this being cynical post-Generation X geopolitics for teenagers, it is not just Iron Man versus terrorist baddies but Iron Man versus corporate weapons-makers who are secretly helping the terrorists. This is amusing because Marvel Comics is probably as big a Leviathan as any military-industrial group. The world's largest comic publishers have done so well out of franchises like the X-Men and Spider-man that this time they have decided to make the film themselves and keep all the cash.

They've helped boost their profits with an enormous amount of product placement. When Stark comes back from three weeks' torture in Afghanistan the first thing he asks for is "an American cheeseburger"; he then proceeds to walk around with a prominently placed Burger King bag. This almost perfectly mirrors the spoof Hot Shots, where the hero is asked where he's going after saving the world; he replies "Disneyland" and is handed a pile of cash by a corporate executive.

Actor Robert Downey Jr said the main challenge of playing Tony Stark would be "making a wealthy, establishmentarian, weapons-manufacturing, hard-drinking, womanising p---- into a character who is likable and a hero". Downey Jr, known for his sense of humour as well as his drug problems, is of course talking about himself (apart from the weapons-manufacturing, I assume). It is his wit and charisma that makes this film entertaining even for non-comic fans. It is genuinely pleasing to see an actor who has come so close to throwing away a rare, God-given talent finally return from the abyss of drugs and drink.