That a film has been made of Iron Man, one of the more mediocre superheroes on Marvel's illustrious roster, is a troubling sign that Hollywood's always anemic creativity still hasn't quite bottomed out.  If the “Iron Man” franchise takes flight, can The Crimson Dynamo, Rocket Raccoon, Ka-Zar, and Groo The Wanderer be far behind?  More frighteningly, a film based on a theme park ride is probably the reason Jon Favreau's “Iron Man” got off the ground in the first place.  The recruitment of Robert Downey Jr. to play Tony Stark, billionaire genius and the world's most faithful Maxim reader, is clearly attributable to the success of Johnny Depp in “Pirates of the Carribean”.  Depp made it cool for bad boys with real acting chops to step up and get paid to play with Hollywood's expensive toys.  Downey, who singlehandedly saves the film, hasn't had this much fun since “Kiss Kiss Bang Bang”.  Surely his accountant won't be the only one to notice the difference in paydays.

None of this amounts to much of a serious indictment against a popcorn extravaganza like “Iron Man”.  The hiring of Favreau as director, the man who made a splash as the writer and star of the cult classic “Swingers”, was the second stroke of genius and the other major announcement that the whole affair is tongue in cheek, as it ought to be.  Favreau's warm, wry, regular Joe sensibility is vital to “Iron Man”, which threatens to be swallowed up by its special effects as surely as its hero is encased in a red titanium suit of armor.  Wisely, Favreau gives Downey, Jr. plenty of time to fire his deadpan sarcasm at a wide array of hopelessly one-dimensional cut-outs.  The first scene in the movie sets the tone, introducing us to Stark as he's riding in a humvee, hungover and sipping a scotch, rolling through the mountains of Afghanistan.  He charms the fatigues off a trio of grunts with his banter, and if it feels amusingly disconcerting, as if Stark had wandered onto the wrong studio backlot, stumbling from the set of “Swingers 2” onto a Michael Bay blockbuster. That, of course, is exactly what “Iron Man” is.  The sense that two different movies have been edited together remains, and happily so.  Not a single character besides Stark is even remotely developed— least of all Gwyneth Paltrow as the faithful Pepper Potts, who is less pepper than baby powder— but with Downey, Jr. behind the trigger even target practice is a blast to watch.

So thin are the characters, in fact, that most of the best exchanges in the movie occur between Downey Jr. and his crew of AI sidekicks.   Whether trading quips with Jarvis, his chatty house computer, or chiding his robotic lab partners, who have the personalities of hapless little brothers (“You're a tragedy”, he mutters to a giant metal arm that can't hold a magnifying glass straight), Downey, Jr.'s best co-stars are the F/X artists.  Favreau expertly directs one hilarious sequence in which Stark warns his metal minions not to douse him with a fire extinguisher, only to finish a breathtaking night flight falling on top of a smashed sportscar, finally humiliated in a cloud of CO2.  Another funny bit has Stark testing the foot-jets on his suit.  We watch the countdown through the lens of a camera held by the robot, and Favreau lets it play like a homemade YouTube video: Stark carefully counts down to zero and promptly rockets himself straight into a concrete wall, Wile E. Coyote-style.  Later he's caught in an intimate moment with his cyborgs.  “Admit it, this isn't the worst thing you've caught me doing”, he tells Pepper when she interrupts his robots disrobing him.  Favreau winks at us to acknowledge that the ostensible love interest is merely a third wheel who occasionally interrupts the love affair between Stark and his gadgets.  Welcome to the boys club of summer movies, Ms. Paltrow.

Favreau includes these self-conscious jokes knowing that any comic book movie will flounder without them, and “Iron Man” is one of the better of such movies to come along because it doesn't take itself seriously.  And when it delivers the goods, it really delivers.  The effects are Oscar-worthy, the widgets and next-generation computer interfaces are bleeding-edge sexy, and all the boxes for schoolboy fantasies are ticked off one after the other, the Gee Whiz factor hittig eleven when Stark chooses hot-rod red for the color of his suit. “Iron Man” has everything: hot women, hot cars, fancy robots, jet planes, Army technology, and even a private jet transformed into a nightclub complete witha  stripper pole.  It is precisely here that Favreau and Downey Jr. are most valuable, because their light comedy dilutes the 'roided-up masculinity that would otherwise make the film dance to the thunder of war drums.  They don't give the movie humanity, exactly, but certainly an agreeable smidgen of irony.  Favreau and his central group of actors, Downey Jr., Paltrow, Jeff Bridges, and Terence Howard, exude a comforting familiarity, functioning almost as corporate spokespeople for their own movie. We all know the heart of the film is made of pixels, not flesh and blood, they seem to tell us, but we are here to guarantee its integrity.

Ah, the movie's heart.  Favreau was lucky enough to have a superlative joke built into his story, a glaring bit of self-conscious wit that's so obvious it practically escapes notice.  The joke, of course, is that “Iron Man” doesn't have a heart— that is, Iron Man's heart is a hollow cavity in his chest into which a power source fits snugly.  (Stark has a heart, but without the mini arc-reactor he would perish.)  What better criticism of summer blockbusters can possibly be made than the creepy sight of Pepper Potts reaching into the metal hollow inside Stark's chest? Open-heart surgery on the Tin Man: this is the best instance of smart self-consciousness that plays hide and seek throughout the movie. Other instances include Stark's aforementioned sessions of cybersex, or the inverting of the Icarus myth so that Iron Man falls when his “wings” freeze rather than melt, or the way the exploding reactor manages to combine the Death Star's lethal laser ray with a visual quotation from “Raiders Of The Lost Ark”, or the way Stark mistakes a pajama'd Stan Lee for Hugh Hefner, Lee having essentially become a pimp for Marvel's heroes the way Hefner sells his Bunnies.  It may not amount to much, but there's as much meta as metal in “Iron Man”; the movie laughs at itself with more sophistication than the average tongue-in-cheek summer blockbuster.

“Iron Man” does lose control of one its central subtexts, however.  With echoes of the War on Terror abounding, “Iron Man” explores the relationship of business to militarism, or Eisenhower's now-axiomatic military industrial complex.  Though the film never moves into a liberal position (Stark and his CEO acidly refer to environmentalists as “hippies”), it does, through its hero, seem to want more "accountability" for weapons manufacturers.  Stark Industries, as a corporation, plays an important role as power is wrested out of Stark's hands by the villainous war profiteer who heads the company.  In asking us to sympathize with the sudden shift in Stark's heart—or ‘heart’—from unscrupulous moneymaking toward conscience-directed research, the movie is really asking us to cheer on the redemption of both a man and a corporation.  A couple of times the company's falling stock prices are mentioned.  A few of Stark's most soulful moments occur in press conferences.  In the one scene in which Iron Man saves innocent civilians, his actions seem more motivated by retribution for the theft of his property than altruistic heroism. The audience, it would seem, is supposed to care about Stark's humanity but specifically in his role as a CEO.  Rehabilitation of the company is inseperable from rehabilitation of the man.

Alongside Stark's discovery of his conscience is another anxiety, that of the burden of being his father's son.  Stark's father worked on the Manhattan Project, helping deliver the bomb in 1945.  What's fascinating in “Iron Man” is that Stark's trauma in the desert forces him to re-evaluate his philosophy rather than reverse it.  He still wants his weapons, only without the guilt.  If comic books reflect the mood of American society, as they often have in the past, “Iron Man” is enlightening: the salient wish in the story is that technology would once more inspire our most fantastic dreams rather than trouble us with our darkest nightmares.  The nation longs for the more innocent days of comic books and pulp sci-fi when machines promised to give us flight, the happy side of the Icarus myth, not apocalypse beamed down from satellites.  But beneath this, hovering in the film's allusions to the present wars in Iraq in Afghanistan, is a deeper wish that mirrors a disturbing longing in our culture for the halcyon days of '45.  Oh, how we desire the clean kill, the justified slaughter, the “good war” which fate so generously bestowed on our forefathers.  "Iron Man" does not envision a future in which we walk away from killing any more than Stark envisions a future outside his corporation.  Stark knows a wrong turn was taken somwewhere, to be sure, but he doesn't know where it was; and if this film is any indication, our future will give us a choice between war and more humane war, not war and peace.  More of the same, only much more soothingly attractive— a friendlier face on a corporate product, just like, oh, Robert Downey, Jr. in “Iron Man”.