Iron Man is the latest superhero film from the Marvel Comics stable. The thing with Iron Man is that he’s a self-made hero, whose powers derive from his genius engineering skill, which itself has also given him access to power in the form of immense wealth.

Tony Stark, the man who wears the Iron Man suit, is a billionaire industrialist who enjoys Bill Gates style riches from his arms business, and a reputation for booze and women that…well, it helps explain why he’s played by Robert Downey Jr. Frankly he’s a jerk, albeit an amusing one, and Downey plays him wonderfully, giving him a hint of badda-bing as well as a streak of geek.

It’s a clever balance, but there’s a fundamental problem here because Tony Stark is already a grown and successful man at the start of the story. Compare with Peter Parker, Spiderman, a teenager who acquires powers in the context of an emotionally richer life than Stark’s. Stark’s life is light on genuine intimacy, while Parker’s superhero origins are meshed with his failure to save his uncle from being killed.

Tony Stark is a grown-up hero with a grown-up problem: how to turn his arms business into one that can help the world rather than contribute to its conflicts. All very well, except bringing this grown-up theme to life requires some pretty simplistic storytelling. Which is fine: you don’t expect multi-dimensional stories in a summer tentpole movie, even if it is about the consequences of a change of heart by a tycoon in the midst of the military-industrial complex.

But hey, bring on the bad guys. Every hero is defined by the quality of his nemesis, and in Iron Man Robert Downey Jr is set against his right-hand man, Obadiah Stane, played more than capably by Jeff Bridges, who is up to no good in Stark Industries. Stane is in cahoots with the Al Qaeda-likes who are the film’s initial villains, and creates an even bigger and more fearsome set of armour for them, which he first uses against his employer.

It’s all well put together in terms of plot and pace, and different strands are threaded together adeptly. Gwyneth Paltrow as PA Pepper Potts is the woman who very literally touches Tony Stark’s damaged heart, in a scene that’s all about the tenderness between them – and also sets the seeds for a crucial bit of action that leads to the bad guy’s comeuppance later. For all that craft and skill, there’s something cold at times about the way it feels, particularly notable in what has to be the most egregious example of product placement I’ve yet seen, when Stark comes home from captivity in Afghanistan and, before anything else, demands a cheeseburger.

It’s a whole lot of fun in a whizzbang way, but there’s something about Iron Man that’s not as compelling as Batman or Spiderman: they’re defined by primal emotional situations that we can all empathise with (the death of parents or a guardian leading the heroes to find their purpose in life). Tony Stark, by contrast, is a successful businessman whose biggest problem is that he can’t make an emotional connection with women. But so what? As a playboy, he gets to have flings with stunning models and actresses he picks up at casinos and film premieres. A lot of men – and this is a film aimed more at a male audience – would kill for a problem like that. Anyway, there’s still plenty of room to make a sequel or two, and hints that it could offer glimpses into other facets of the Marvel universe as yet unrealised on screen.