Tony Stark (Robert Downey Jr.) is the party man chairman of Stark Industries, a company that sends weapons worldwide. When Tony must go to a conference in Afghanistan to show the military his new missile, it’s a success. Everything is going Tony’s way.

This changes when Tony gets kidnapped by an Afghani terrorist group. While they are attacking, Tony sees one of his company’s missiles and it almost kills him. Another prisoner named Yinson (Shaun Toub) saves him by putting an electro-magnetic plate attached to a car battery in Tony’s chest to keep the shrapnel from entering his heart.

The terrorists order Tony to make them a missile just like the one he showed to the military. With help from Yinson, Tony makes an iron suit in order to escape his captors. He succeeds in doing so, only his suit gets destroyed.

When he gets back to the United States, after getting a cheeseburger at Burger King, Tony announces to the press that Stark Industries will no longer be making weapons so they don’t fall into the wrong hands. Everyone is shocked, including Tony’s assistant, Pepper Potts (Gwyneth Paltrow), Air Force friend Jim Rhodes (Terrence Howard) and his mentor and second in command, Obadiah Stane (Jeff Bridges).

Using the numerous robots in his basement, Tony recreates the iron suit that he made to escape the terrorists. This time he can go fly up to about 85,000 feet before flailing out. (By the way, my dad used to fly the U-2 airplane that could go that high.) He uses the suit to stop the bad guys, and the action scenes are done with superb CGI enhancement.

As I mentioned above, the CGI is awesome; they picked the right actors for the film, and it was very funny. The whole movie was so cool I don’t even have a favorite part. In the beginning, however, we see Tony kissing a reporter in his bed, they fall off his bed, and when she wakes up in the morning Tony is not there. The movie could have done without this.

There are several uses of strong language, including “SOB,” so I’m recommending this for children ages 13 and up, even though my 10 year old sister and her friend Morgan saw it and liked it. My video-addicted friend Duran saw this and liked it also. It was 6 thumbs up with our group Saturday night at the Carmike Theater in Newnan.

Rated PG-13 for some intense sequences of sci-fi action and violence and brief suggestive content mentioned above.

*** 1/2

login to post comments