When Iron Rusts

I am just back from seeing the finest movie of my life. It’s called Iron Man. No, please don’t dismiss the movie based on its name. Read the review at least. Please, I insist.

Iron Man is originally a Marvel comic hero and his real name, that is when he steps out of his red and gold platinum-something glitzy costume, is Tony Stark.

The movie unfolds like this: Stark is a multimillionaire because his father had founded a weapons manufacturing company, which he has perfected and taken to even greater heights. He has a sense of humor that I think Hollywood (bless its heart) had intended to be irreverent, but which to me seemed painfully annoying. He is a playboy like all good multimillionaires should be, and he has a huge mansion hanging from a cliff that overlooks the Pacific Ocean in Malibu, California. The house itself has every imaginable and unimaginable automated device, and a pretty housekeeper cum office assistant cum “I am so in love with my boss that you can see it in every flap of my eyelash and every simper of my smiling mouth” jackass, who in non-reel life goes by the name Gwyneth Paltrow.

So back to Stark: Two days after winning a fancy award from the United States government for his contribution to technology, Stark flies to (where else but) Afghanistan. He gives a demonstration of a weapon called Jericho which first flies out from its casing and then reproduces itself into many mini baby missiles while in flight. Incidentally, Jericho literally means “moon” in Hebrew and is at present a town in West Bank, Palestine.

After the successful demonstration, Stark is moving out of the zone in military jeeps when his convoy gets attacked, every good American soldier is killed, and he himself is knocked out. Upon waking up, Stark realizes that he has been kidnapped by brutal Afghanis who speak impeccable Urdu, and that in the little battle that had led to his capture, some shrapnel got buried in his chest and those are now threatening to pierce his heart. Enter weird Swiss doctor who saves Stark’s life, and constructs a magnetic chest plate that needs to be attached to a car battery so that his heart can pump blood normally. Yes, you are supposed to read on without questioning.

Now the Afghanis know who Stark is and they tell him to make Jericho for them. In return they shall release him. Stark and Swiss weirdo get down to work. It takes a long time before the whole camp of brown men realize that the two white men are making something else than what they were supposed to. Finally, Stark is able to fool /frighten them and he escapes because all this while he had actually been making an ugly body suit for himself which will let him hop/fly, shoot fire from his elbows (yeah baby!), and just scare the hell out of anyone he wants to.

Within some quick, mind-numbing scenes, Stark manages to escape, and then he is flown out of Afghanistan and into America by his best friend in the American army. Best friend is African American, by the way, just in case you were wondering. No, of course not, there ARE no stereotypes in Hollywood. Everything is darn original and absolutely new.

Our boy flies back home, and upon returning he demands the first thing that will endear him to every viewer. He wants to eat a grilled cheeseburger. Aw…I nearly got sentimental in this scene and delicately grabbed the end of my shirt to wipe the tear that had been threatening to spill over my cheek for a while.

Then Stark goes about perfecting his model for Iron Man suit. In the ensuing ride, he proves he has a heart and a conscience, and that he is a man of principles. The real villain of the piece is also revealed to the viewer and by this time we have been bombarded with enough technological tosh to believe anything. In fact, if they had even showed my grandmother smirking in the corner as the grand villainess of the piece I would have believed them.

Robert Downey Jr. as Iron Man or superhero or mortal man with a glowing cyclical heart is painful. Jeff Bridges as Obadiah Stane/ Iron Monger is entertaining. (You have to see the movie to understand what this is about.) Gwyneth Paltrow as Pepper, the housekeeper, is wonderful considering her histrionics in this movie required that she not eat for twenty months prior to signing on the dotted line, and practice wearing sky-scraper-high heels for thirty-six months before shooting actually began.

Give me a Govinda-Karisma Kapoor-Kader Khan-David Dhawan combination any day.