Jackson Free Press

Robert Downey Jr. doesn't act the starring role in "Iron Man 3"; he shoots up on it. As Tony Stark, the brilliant head of a billion-dollar conglomerate that defends American freedom, he jets around the world in a wild array of Iron Man suits, as well as tinkers and designs slick devices from odds and ends at the local hardware store. He has an overachiever debauch. And he's not modest: "I'm Tony Stark. I build neat stuff, got a great girl, occasionally save the world. So why can't I sleep?"

Stark's girlfriend Pepper Potts (Gwyneth Paltrow) is not shabby, either. She heads management at Stark Industries and can wear a sports bra and yoga pants like a hot teenager. Pepper maximizes the whole multi-tasking, perfect woman thing. She gracefully manages Stark's eccentricities and panic attacks without unleashing a single drop of sweat on her creamy smooth skin. She is more than a damsel in distress in this film. In fact, all the female characters in this film are brainy beauties, living on one side or the other of the great divide between good and evil. 

Loosely based on the story arc of "Extremis" (part of Marvel's "Iron Man" comic book series), Shane Black, who co-wrote the screenplay with Drew Pearce, directs one of the most pleasurable action films in the last decade. Black had made a film that fits Downey as snuggly and perfectly as the Mark 42 suit of armor.

"Iron Man 3" begins Dec. 31, 1999, before Stark trades in his body parts for a red-hot glowing electric heart. He's filthy rich, braggy smart and part lounge lizard, hanging around with the brightest ladies at the new millennium convention in Bern, Switzerland. He spends the night with Maya Hansen (Rebecca Hall), the inventor of Extremis, an experimental regenerative treatment. It's time to put your suspend-disbelief hat on. Extremis allows plants to recover from crippling injuries, such as sheared leaves from overzealous muscle man Happy Hogan (Jon Favreau).

Little did Stark know, but when he told the dweebie scientist Aldrich Killian (Guy Pearce) to meet him on the roof and then blew him off, he created a lifelong enemy. Within 13 years, Killian turns his company, Advanced Idea Mechanics (AIM), into a beast. Killian buffs up, gets a hair cut and learns super suave maneuvers that manage to turn Pepper's head a notch. He's also inclined to the melodramatic. "Failure is the fog through which we find triumph," he says.

The story has predictable and unpredictable elements. We would have been disappointed if there were no explosions, for example. Rest assured: Black delivers the goods, the gizmos and the action. You can expect a terrorist bad dude (Ben Kingsley as the Mandarin), a president (William Sadler) who needs saving and Stark's patriotic soul mate. As Col. James Rhodes, Don Cheadle dons (no pun intended) the patriot armor like a champ. The exchanges between Downey and Cheadle peel off effortlessly. 

Downey is his most irresistible when he makes a ribald jittery style out of teasing and taunting. He's a master of his trade, and his performance welds the pieces of this film together. As Richard Brody from The New Yorker observed, "The most impressive thing about the writer and director Shane Black's 'Iron Man 3' is that, for all the fiery martial action and the flamboyant visual effects, he turns it into Downey's movie, not the character's."

"Iron Man 3" is Robert Downey Jr., and he soars into new, uncharted heights of entertainment with this film.