I was tidying up the living room yesterday afternoon – we had a clothing purge, so there were ill-chosen items scattered across the floor and prized garments folded along the back of the sofa… do not ask me about the shoes – and I shoved Iron Man in the DVD player to pass the time. It’s exactly what you’d expect: macho guy, brief origin story, conscience, do-goodery. And yet… it’s nothing like what you’d expect.

I had the same feeling when Mrs H and I went to see Mamma Mia!; for the first six minutes or so I thought, all right, this is going to be tolerable rubbish. Fine. And then the whole thing took wing in a remarkable sort of way: some kind of synergy between the music and the actors – who were transparently having a terrific time – and the story took over, and that was it. Bang. Huge fun.

Iron Man doesn’t have a take-off moment like that, because ultimately it has only three characters and we meet them all almost immediately. Three excellent actors – Robert Downey Jnr., Gwyneth Paltrow, and Jeff Bridges – are working with a script a hundred times smarter and funnier than it has any right to be. From the opening sequence in the back of a humvee, you know that – barring lousy script decisions or bad directing – Robert Downey Jnr. is going to be great. What comes as a surprise is the emotional tension between him and Paltrow. It’s warm and funny and real. As with Mamma Mia!, you find you care.

These movies are the same: films which had every chance of being awful, largely gender-specific, drab reruns of iffy stories from other media (I learned a new use for the word ‘remediation‘ from Tom Abba last Saturday; come on, Merriam-Webster, catch up!) – but that’s not what happened. Good script, good acting, and good directing made them into something infinitely more interesting.

Is one of them actually better than the other? Yes. Mamma Mia! has the edge.

But only because they made Pierce Brosnan sing.