Iron Man: A Movie Marvel

He soars through the night sky, disrupts military aviation, wages holy war against those twin bastions of evil, terrorists and corporate bigwigs. He's Tony Stark (Robert Downey Jr.), zillionaire industrialist, and he arrives accompanied by the POW!, BANG! and KA-BOOM! suitable for a movie based on a comic book, but with lots more intelligence than the genre usually demands. It's Iron Man to the rescue, yanking movies and the worldwide box office out of its months-long doldrums and into the stratosphere.

Starting tonight with saturation screenings, Iron Man kicks off the blockbuster movie season right on time — seven weeks before the summer solstice. But the Hollywood moguls can't afford to wait for June 21. Summer is the season designed to remind the still-vast film audience why they pay to see movies. And for the past few years, summer means now. In 2007, three of the four top-grossing films (Spider-man 3, Shrek the Third and Pirates of the Caribbean: At World's End) all came out in May. (The fourth, Transformers, was released in the flop-proof July 4 week.)

This year on consecutive May weekends, the plexes should be clogged with customers to see Iron Man — the first movie financed by the comics-based Marvel Enterprises — followed by the Wachowski brothers' Speed Racer and the latest installments in the Narnia and Indiana Jones franchises. Super-heroes, fast cars and a lion who might be Jesus: star power supreme, just when the industry needs it.

So say goodbye to the less exalted characters of the cinema's winter and early spring: the Asian-American dopers and slacker documentarians, the weepie men and baby mamas, the caveman hunters and Boleyn sisters, the chronically unmarried or uncomfortably pregnant or serial-killer imperiled women — you'll hardly be seeing any women at all in star roles. Even Judd Apatow and his goofball satyrs are taking a break. (The reigning producer of R-rated comedy has two movies opening toward the shank of the summer.) Fallible, ordinarily engaging, human-size, earthbound characters just don't measure up when the weather turns warmer. We need another hero, and lots of 'em, the bigger, stronger and cartoonier the better.

At the beginning of Iron Man — directed by Jon Favreau from a script by Mark Fergus, Hawk Ostby, Art Marcum and Matt Holloway — Tony Stark is nearly a cartoon villain, though he's drawn in the bold, confident strokes worthy of a '60s Marvel Comic cover by Jack Kirby. He has a Mephistophelean goatee and a glint in his eyes that suggests this former boy wonder is a genius at wasting his genius. He's a devoted practitioner of pride, lust and avarice, to name the fanciest of your deadly sins. This is a man who has got it all: wealth, power, glamour, notoriety and more women than he can shake his stick at. At the very moment he's supposed to be receiving an award at a Las Vegas convention, he's actually at the craps tables surrounded by his favorite pets, big money and fast women — both endlessly duplicable, both instantly disposable. It's all booty to him.

Tony is an arms dealer, an occupation that has fascinated playwrights for ages (George Bernard Shaw in Man and Superman, Arthur Miller in All My Sons) and accounts for some of the evil-genius rep of Halliburton's gift to governance, Dick Cheney. In his first appearance in the March 1963 issue of Tales of Suspense, as written by Stan Lee and his brother Larry Lieber, and illustrated by Kirby and Don Heck, Stark was inspired by Howard Hughes in his Spruce Goose phase: titan of industry, crackerjack engineer-inventor, indefatigable wooer of Hollywood actresses. (Later in the decade he'd be transformed into a cool Cold Warrior, fighting the Commies in Vietnam.) In the movie he's more a Richard Branson figure: suave, sexy, driven, a master of self-promotion and record-breaking stunts. What else could a rich man need?

Redemption. When Tony goes to an Afghanistan-like war zone to unveil a new weapon, his jeep is blown up, his team of escorts killed, and as he passes out he sees that the missile that did the damage came from Stark Industries. Severely wounded — and kept alive with a car battery wired to his heart — he comes to in the cave of Taliban-like insurgents, whose head-shaved leader (Faran Tahir) would very much appreciate it if Tony could confect a home-made bomb for him. Instead, with the help of a fellow prisoner (Shaun Toub), Tony constructs a heavily-armed metal suit, blasts his way out of the cave and resolves to change his nickname from Merchant of Death to semi-pacific Iron Man. "I have more to offer the world," he says, "than making things blow up."

If Tony's conversion isn't quite as history-altering as Saul's on the road to Tarsus, it'll do fine here. Where he used to think he could make himself great, now he wants to make himself useful. He resolves to study war no more, to do penance for the sins that made him rich. In a way, Tony is a throwback to the tycoons of yore, Rockefeller and Carnegie, who made fortunes by exploiting their workers, then tried to atone through vast philanthropies. (As if building universities and concert halls was a nobler form of payback than contributing to the widows' and orphans' fund of their late employees.)

Tony is as smart, wily and manic as ever, but now he's a man with a mission: to dismantle his own company. Which doesn't thrill his longtime, avuncular, head-shaved partner, Obadiah Stane (Jeff Bridges). No matter: Tony has never taken "Don't" for an answer. Like a geek in a Silicon Valley garage, a knight smithing his own armor, Tony retreats to his workroom to build himself a new casing. And he won't make Dr. Frankenstein's mistake of using shoddy materials. This will be no stitched-together, run-amok creature. It can't be Tony's ruin; it must literally save his lifesaver. When he's done, out steps Iron Man: a monster with heart.

We're not saying that Iron Man (actually, as Tony says, "Gold-Titanium Alloy Man") is some gigantic Gandhi. Nonviolent resistance is a sanctified political strategy, but as the key to Act Three of a comic-book movie, it kinda sucks. For Stark, his cool new gadget is both a fun toy (he can fly inside it, attracting the attention of military planes) and a weapon (for the climactic face-off with Iron Monger, a larger version of Iron Man). These are the episodes, executed with plenty of technical panache, which will keep young eyes stuck on the screen this weekend. Kids will see themselves in that kewl flight suit, and image that they are manipulating the Man and Monger automatons, sweller and more humanoid than any Transformer.

But the real treat is for grownups, who get a beguiling character study behind and above the special effects. Favreau — who directed the best Will Ferrell comedy (Elf) and an agreeably mature fantasy (Zathura: A Space Adventure), and before that wrote and starred in Swingers, maybe the sharpest buddy comedy of the '90s — knows that, when making a big movie, you do not leave your I.Q. at the soundstage door; you bend your gifts in different directions. He lends Iron Man the unobtrusive speed and precision of classic comedy. An actor before he was a director, he's not content to let his stars play stereotypes, or even archetypes. Bridges and Toub, and Gwyneth Paltrow as Stark's gal Friday (the most attractive she's been in years), aren't slumming in the least. They're rising to the material, and elevating it.

Downey's the best. In movies he's usually been the skeptical observer in a supporting role (perhaps because his drug history has made producers reluctant to cast him in the lead). He's Irony Man, standing off to the side, undercutting the hero's big dreams or rash motives with a sardonic critique delivered at lightning speed — no mumbling or pauses for him.) He sometimes seems to be in his own movie, one that's smarter and faster than the one he's been signed for. But having been entrusted to carry Iron Man, Downey sets the pace, establishes the tone and this big movie whirls along to keep up with him. Which it does; it fits Downey as smartly as his Iron Man jumpsuit.

Readers of movie reviews often think that critics hate the big Hollywood stuff and cherish only the little films about Romanian abortions or Iranian kids. But some of us, this one anyway, knows that there's an American style — best displayed in the big, smart, kid-friendly epic — that few other cinemas even aspire to, and none can touch. When it works, as it does here, it rekindles even a cynic's movie love. So cheers to Downey, Favreau and the Iron Man production company. They don't call it Marvel for nothing.