From the start of Iron Man, Tony Stark appears every gold/titanium alloy-clad inch a superhero for our time, or at least for America in 2008, and this seems set to be a smart, satisfying action movie. Unfortunately, some of this promise is dissipated in the course of the climactic battle, and the film’s politics, delicately balanced for much of the duration, becomes ever more muddled: the film-makers try to appeal to too many mutually exclusive post-9/11 constituencies – hawks and doves, conspiracy theorists, ultra-patriots. Still, if the film is ultimately disappointing it is in part because it begins so well, and there is a lot to enjoy before the over-the-top final act.

Stark, played by Robert Downey Jr, is, like Downey Jr himself, a talkative charmer with a strong hedonistic streak. When not gambling, drinking or bedding women, Stark is a brilliant and fabulously wealthy armaments entrepreneur with a shifty father figure in the form of bald-headed business partner Obadiah Stane (Jeff Bridges) and some love interest in Pepper Potts (Gwyneth Paltrow, got up to look disconcertingly like Kirsten Dunst in the Spider-Man films). His easy, amoral life is interrupted when he is kidnapped by some brutal baddies on a trip to Afghanistan and compelled to construct for them a version of his latest super-weapon. Here Stark improvises brilliantly, turns the tables on his captors, constructing a near-impregnable exoskeleton and, in covering himself up, discovers his own inner hero.