Iron Man is the latest instalment of Hollywood’s rediscovery of comic book heroes. With the fans, characterisation and storyboarding already there, it’s not surprising that every comic book hero, no matter how unlikely they will work on film (read Ghost Rider here) is being green-lighted. Being a fan, myself, of superhero films and comics, I have enjoyed this run of movies, believing that the themes and storylines drawn from years of excellent comic book writers are often far superior to both book based efforts and the truck load of dull, repetitive and predictable ‘original’ scripts coming out of Hollywood today.

So, with all this in mind, you can understand how disappointed I was in this film. I wasn’t expecting a five star effort and was quite willing to leave my brain at the door, but the violence, sexism and faux antiwar themes were impossible to ignore.

Pepper Potts (Gwyneth Paltrow) is touted at the beginning of the film as the strong female figure, who can take care of herself. And yet, at no time does she do so. She serves her boss (Tony Stark), doing whatever he tells her too, swoons at his first advance, gets all skittish and pathetic when faced with danger and consistently runs to the nearest man for help whenever threatened.

The M rating was a real distraction for me. Despite being a Tarantino fan for years, I found myself unable to relax while watching torture and other violent scenes, knowing that I was surrounded by children in the cinema.

Robert Downey Jr’s portrayal of Tony Stark’s rich-boy extravagance and then the transition to the determined superhero is excellent, as always, but even this could not distract from the wafer thin antiwar theme. It is all too easy to say making weapons of mass destruction and then allowing them to end up in the wrong hands is the problem, but where is the question of how you determine whose hands are the wrong ones? The real challenge of this film should have been to create a hero who is not simply bigger and stronger and able to thump the ‘bad guys’ harder with his new ‘weapon’ in order to win, but to suggest violence against violence is not the answer.

The best scene in the film comes after the credits. I do not want to spoil it for those who have not seen it yet, but suffice to say, Tony Stark is confronted by someone who gives him perspective on what he is doing and the opportunity to do something that has thought behind it and not just action. It is a teaser of something much better in this otherwise soulless film.