Iron Man Reviews
Top CriticRobert Downey Jr. gives a nicely sardonic performance as Tony Stark, a rich playboy and the brilliant heir to his father's weapons manufacturing dynasty.
There are a few scenes in Iron Man that make you realize why we rely on giant studios and big budgets come the summer months.
Full Review
| Original Score: B
A supremely confident, well-tooled entertainment. It's bound to be the early pace-maker for the oncoming glut of summer blockbusters.
At the end of the day it's Robert Downey Jr. who powers the lift-off separating this from most other superhero movies.
Full Review
| Original Score: 4/4
Jon Favreau's 'Iron Man': The $100-Million Iraq War Movie
The gadgetry is absolutely dazzling, the action is mostly exhilarating, the comedy is scintillating and the whole enormous enterprise throbs with dramatic energy.
Iron Man is an action sci-fi blockbuster extravaganza that provides cartoon thrills for thinking people. It's the best movie of its kind since the second Spider-Man movie four years ago.
Full Review
| Original Score: 3.5/4
Actually feels like a classic comic book: fast, furious and flip. Forget about superheroes with love problems and tortured souls.
Full Review
| Original Score: 4/5
Directed with joyful verve and a nice pinch of cultural nerve by Jon Favreau, Iron Man reinvigorates hope in the joys of the summer movie. It is simple â" and not so simple â" fun.
Full Review
| Original Score: 3.5/4
When Iron Man is zooming above bejewelled southern California, I expected a thundering lyricism but instead settled for some routine CGI stunts. I suppose it's asking too much for a great actor to be matched up with a great director.
Downey could have taken a tragic tack. But he has fun just figuring out how to make the armor suit work. His sarcasm and almost drunken Tony Curtis body language transform the scenes of Iron Man.
Full Review
| Original Score: 2.5/4
Iron Man is an unusually good superhero picture. Or at least -- since it certainly has its problems -- a superhero movie that's good in unusual ways.
| Original Score: 4/5
This middle section, in which the newly energized Tony tinkers with his emerging superpowers like a kid in shop class, is the movie's finest and funnest hour.
After 2003's Elf and 2005's Zathura, Favreau has now made three smart, family-friendly, high-concept popcorn movies.
Full Review
| Original Score: 3/4
It's Iron Man to the rescue, yanking movies and the worldwide box office out of its months-long doldrums and into the stratosphere.
Iron Man may not be distinguished enough to convert you to the cause. But Downey and Favreau give the movie a quirky flavor it can call its own. For that we can be grateful.
Toggling between Stark's impish goatee and Iron Man's full-metal body condom, and amid so many generic fireballs, kill shots and earsplitting thumps, bumps and crunches, the film finally collapses under its own weight.
Even as Iron Man fulfills its genre obligations, it transcends them, thanks to lively direction by Favreau and, especially, the tour de force performance by Downey.
The payoff of casting Downey is as big as the risk. He's not in the movie, he owns it in a way that makes it hard to imagine without him.
Full Review
| Original Score: 3/4
[It's] an absolute blast to watch, a consummate piece of popcorn entertainment made with wit and class, and it leaves you so pumped for a sequel that it is practically guaranteed to become a huge hit. The bar for the summer movie season has been set.
| Original Score: 3/4
Iron Man is fresh and fast enough to remind you of why you liked comics to begin with.
Full Review
| Original Score: 3/4
Industrial-strength comic book moviemaking of the most entertaining order, Iron Man is darn near invincible fun, a perfect mix of high-tech dazzle and good old-fashioned charisma that's bound to leave audiences begging for more.
Full Review
| Original Score: B
The movie rises and falls on the strength of Downey, and it rises pretty high.
Full Review
| Original Score: 4/5
One of the hippest, best-written and best-directed superhero movies ever -- a splendid way to kick off the summer movie season.
Full Review
| Original Score: 3.5/4
Downey's unbeatable charisma makes these problems less troublesome than they would be otherwise, but wouldn't it be nice if they didn't exist at all?
Full Review
| Original Score: 2.5/5
Hollywood has unearthed an unlikely weapon of mass destruction: Robert Downey Jr.
Full Review
| Original Score: 3/4
Downey's richly human performance as a reformed rake who relies on his intelligence, feels both personal and genuinely fresh.
Full Review
| Original Score: 3/4
Although Downey spends a certain amount of screentime inside that suit, his face still carries the movie, giving it emotional weight.
There's no rust on the first blockbuster of summer '08: Iron Man is an ironclad cinch to be a hit.
Full Review
| Original Score: 3.5/4
Iron Man is simply great escapism. It deserves to be the first blockbuster of the summer.
Full Review
| Original Score: 4/4
Iron Man kicks off summer on a blazing high note and practically dares the competition to measure up.
| Original Score: 3.5/4
Despite several adrenaline-pumping moments, Favreau and Downey stay focused on the real story -- about a man learning to take responsibility for his actions. For all its firepower and CGI slickness, that's what really makes Iron Man fly.
Full Review
| Original Score: 3/4
This is one summer blockbuster that succeeds on brains, not bombast.
Full Review
| Original Score: 3.5/4
The fun of Iron Man, a Marvel adaptation in which a routine arc has been burnished with great elegance and skill, is the way that it heals the split, soldering the two halves of its hero into a single organically driven figure.
Full Review
| Original Score: B+
Mainly it has Robert Downey Jr. The newly insurable actor, who has had his run-ins with various chemicals in the past, plays this louche playboy with a knowing glint in his eye."
Full Review
| Original Score: 3.5/4
Beneath the requisite spectacle is an issue-laden storyline with heart to go along with its brains.
Much was made of this 'risky' casting, but it pays off beautifully. Downey, already a walking comic strip, imparts crucial verve to [director] Favreau's static compositions.
Full Review
| Original Score: 4/6
Over the years, there have been only a handful of exceptional superhero movies, and Iron Man is among them.
Full Review
| Original Score: 3.5/4
There's a slightly depressed, going-through-the-motions feel to the entire show.
Iron Man is a shapely piece of mythmaking.
Iron Man may not make the A-list of Marvel Comics' stable -- home to Spider-Man, X-Men and the Hulk -- but he may be the cinema superhero for the rest of us.
[An] expansively entertaining special effects extravaganza.
Light on both CGI and moral quandaries, [it posesses] neither the zip and sparkle of a Spider-Man nor the brooding existential subtexts of Batman Begins.
Full Review
| Original Score: 3/5
