What you have been hearing is true; it’s really really good and Robert Downing Jr. is the best part. Usually with these superhero movies there’s some cheesy character moments that you put up with in order to get to the good action-y stuff. With this movie there was some action and it was all right but I found myself impatient to get to the next character moment.
If you stay ’till the end, after the very last credits (and this is technically a spoiler but I can’t imagine anyone reading this who would care) you get to see Tony Stark come back home and a shadowy figure reveals himself as Nick Fury (played by Samuel Jackson), who’s here to tell him about something called the Avenger Initiative. When this happened in the theater I was in on Friday night, there was a wave of geek joy that spread from the front row (where one guy was literally jumping up and down with excitement) all the way to the back, presumably because it implies that there will be more Iron Man movies and more importantly a possible Avengers movie which, if it’s as good as this Iron Man movie, I think we can all agree would totally rock.