Iron Man first summer blockbuster

Starring the likes of Robert Downey Jr., Gwyneth Paltrow, Jeff Bridges and Terrence Howard, “Iron Man” boasts the kind of rarefied call sheet one would typically associate with an Oscar-customized ensemble drama, not a smash-mouth sci-fi blockbuster about a guy in a flying robot suit.

But there Downey and Co. are – with their seven collective Oscar nominations – slumming it to superb effect in director Jon Favreau’s roaring adaptation of the long-running Marvel comic. For once, the summer movie season is starting off on the right foot – even if the foot happens to be encased in armor and equipped with rocket thrusters.

And, yes, the cast rocks. Led by Downey’s career-resurrecting performance as billionaire weapons peddler Tony Stark, it proves just as indispensable to the movie’s giddy escapist appeal as the seamless CGI effects and eye-popping pyrotechnics.

Indeed, after the fact, it’s hard to think of anybody but the “Chaplin” star playing Stark, a fast-living, sharp-witted genius playboy who brags about bagging Maxim models and likes to dazzle military brass by test-firing his own mountain-destroying munitions.

“Peace is about having a bigger stick than the other guy,” says the enfant terrible of stick-making, just before whisking another conquest back to his cliffside Malibu digs, with its state-of-the-art auto showroom and robotics fabrication plant. He’s like Howard Hughes reborn as a skirt-chasing gear-head.

Necessarily, Stark gets a taste of his own medicine when he’s ambushed and kidnapped in Afghanistan by a multinational terrorist clique. Fortunately, it’s an extraordinarily stupid multinational terrorist clique, one that sticks the near-mortally wounded Stark in a cave with a massive cache of his own weapons and orders him to build a doomsday weapon. Hey, that’s thinking.

So director Favreau (“Elf”) and a quartet of screenwriters (including “Children of Men” scripters Mark Fergus and Hawk Ostby) don’t perfectly finesse Stark’s superhero transformation. We still get it. Stark, with newfound humility and a glowing pacemaker that keeps his damaged heart from seizing, emerges from the cave/chrysalis with a radical vision for corporate responsibility and a prototype for the lethal red-and-gold bodysuit that will become his Iron Man legacy.

The new-look Stark also creates intriguing fault lines of loyalty among his confidantes: his mentor and Stark Industries chairman Obadiah Stane (Bridges), his protégé and Pentagon liaison Jim Rhodes (Howard) and faithful, secretly smitten assistant Pepper Potts (Paltrow).

Which of these characters will pilot the gargantuan metal nemesis that Stark, in the movie’s thrilling, metal-twisting climax, must ultimately face? Enjoy the suspense. And steel yourself for a sequel.