You might have forgotten this under the onslaught of Serious Business superhero movies like Superman Returns, Batman Begins, the Spider-Man trilogy, Daredevil, et cetera, but superhero stories are supposed to be fun. A good time. Something that makes you say “wow” at least a few times. The term “escapism” has come to have a negative connotation in recent years, but sometimes escapism can be a good thing: if only, for a couple hours, to step into the world of the near-possible. That’s Iron Man, a superhero movie that drops the albatross of intense emotional angst and replaces it with wit and a hero that remains charming even in his flaws. I’d forgotten such things were possible.

Iron Man doesn’t waste a lot of time, either. Within 20 minutes of the opening credits, billionaire weapons designer Tony Stark (Robert Downey, Jr., tailor-made for the role) is captured by mercenaries in Afghanistan and thrown in a cave. They want him to build them one of his missiles, and the bitterness of Tony’s situation deepens when he finds out these mercenaries are customers of his, after a fashion; every single rifle, box of ammunition, and rocket carries the Stark Industries logo.

But he’s not alone in that cave. With him is Yinsen (Shaun Toub), a fellow scientist and the man responsible for keeping Tony alive. There’s shrapnel in Tony’s chest, and left unattended that shrapnel will dig its way into Tony’s heart and kill him. Yinsen has worked up a sort of plug-n-play rig in Tony’s chest to, somehow, keep the shrapnel out. The whole process is a lot more fi than sci, but just go with it. It’s comics.

Tony pushes past despair and, with Yinsen’s help, instead builds a massive suit of armor that sees him out of the hands of his captors and back into safety. And that cave, it turns out, was Tony’s Road to Damascus: upon arriving home he declares that Stark Industries will no longer be designing or building weapons, much to the chagrin of his partner Obadiah Stane (Jeff Bridges). Tony takes leave for PTSD and sets about building himself a better suit. He figures the only weapon worth building is one used to defend rather than kill people. Stane disapproves, pushes his hostile takeover bid into overdrive, and before you know it we’ve got one of those concrete-shattering superhero fights that always manages to work its way through a busy highway.

What’s surprising about Iron Man is how entertaining such a straightforward story can be, helped in no small part by a clever script from Mark Fergus and Hawk Ostby. The performances are just right, too, and Downey and Bridges are backed up by Gwyneth Paltrow as Stark’s personal assistant and Terrence Howard as Stark’s best friend and liaison to the military. Their performances don’t so much transcend the material as fully embody them; everyone has one or two dimensions, but they play those dimensions to the hilt. They’re also, believe it or not, a little surprising. More than once I found myself surprised by a sudden turn in what in another superhero movie would be a depressingly straightforward character arc.

What I appreciated most about Iron Man was its simple joy in the material, its lack of shyness, its simple joy in being what it is: a big, fun action movie that doesn’t have to dumb itself down to be enjoyable. It takes joy in what it is. Great big “wow” moments are coupled with just-as-enjoyable smaller “wows,” like watching Tony slowly rebuild the suit in his home laboratory… with the assistance of loyal robots and some Social Distortion on the boombox. Those small moments earn the big ones; the first time Tony truly flies, you feel it all: the exhilaration, the imminent danger. I know if I were an 8 year-old boy, my mind would have been blown. It’s all fun, in other words, and a good corrective to the depressing ground most superhero movies tread to gain mainstream credibility. And shouldn’t a movie about a billionaire playboy with a flying suit that makes him invincible be fun?