Robert Downey Jr. in a superhero movie. It's one of those pieces of casting you can tell right off the bat will be deliciously inspired. Sadly, the casting is the most inspired thing about this otherwise extremely average action flick.
We start off seeing Robert Downey Jr.'s weapons manufacturer Tony Stark (replete with a glass of scotch) having his military escort ambushed and himself kidnapped by a terrorist group. The we skip to 36 hours earlier and see him (after the almost painfully familiar info package informing us his rich parents died when he was a child and since he's taken over dad's company - have we not seen Batman?) going over to Afghanistan to do a sales pitch for his company's new weapon, "the jericho".
So after his capture a doctor has hooked a car battery up to his heart to prevent him from being killed by rogue pieces of shrapnel still in his body. The bad guys want him to build them a jericho, he ends up building himself a better power source for his heart and then instead of building a missile, he builds himself an armour suit for him to escape in. Sounds like a succinct plot set up? Hardly, that's half the film.
And therein lies one of the main problems with this film, it's just so plodding and ponderous - there are only so many montages of steel being welded one can take before tedium sets in as he builds the damn thing not once, but twice (the obligatory upgrade when he gets back) and it's literally an hour before he even gets in the final suit. Second big problem is that it's so incredibly predictable and obvious, even for a comic-book film. Jeff Bridges' character (and it's being kind calling it that, Stark aside the characterisation is even more 2D than the comics the film is based on) is the nadir of this, with there being no surprises at all with what his character brings to the film.
Downey has come to play though and delivers an off-beat performance that Johnny Depp would be proud of. Gwyneth Paltrow is very nice in her role as Downey's personal assistant but she very little to do really. The usually reliable Terrence Howard has even less to do and gives the blandest performance I've seen him deliver, his role strips almost everything that's interesting about him as an actor away. And Bridges is solid but again, very little to work with.
So overall, it's just a very average effort which is brought into the realms of decent to almost good by the central performance. Robert Downey Jr. is the only thing that elevates this over the likes of Daredevil as it's drawn out, funny at times, but the worst thing for an action movie - slow. So I'd recommend it for the mischievous turn at the centre but this is neither going to tax the brain cells nor give you an adrenaline rush - it's the Robert Downey Jr. show : without him it would be nothing, and with him it's only just about scraping above average.