He's a shallow playboy, a dangerous arms dealer and a ruthless businessman. Not the sort of person you usually think of as a hero, let alone a superhero. But such is Tony Stark, the very flawed man at the heart of Iron Man, this summer's first big-budget spectacular.
Superheroes have become a regular part of cinema's summer smash hits, with Marvel and DC Comics characters filling screens around the world with larger-than-life stories. Spider-Man, X-Men and Batman, among others, have taken turns on the big screen. Last year, the biggest film of the summer was Transformers, about robots battling it out for control of the Earth.
So what do you get when you combine superheroes with robots? Iron Man, a US$180 million action film that stars Robert Downey Jnr, Jeff Bridges, Gwyneth Paltrow and Terrence Howard.
Iron Man is no robot, but the alter ego of Stark, a billionaire industrialist clad in red and gold hi-tech battle armour.
Based on a Marvel Comics story, Iron Man is the tale of the unlikely hero Stark, who narrowly escapes death to find redemption as a mechanised defender of the weak and downtrodden.
Just as Stark makes a surprising hero, director Jon Favreau, with his background in independent cinema (he wrote Swingers), was perhaps an unusual candidate for bringing Iron Man to the big screen. But Favreau says he was ready for something different. 'You can make a great indie film and no one sees it,' says the 41-year-old. 'But with films, something you want to do is communicate with audiences. This was an opportunity, a genre that's popular and that people have an appetite for.'