Iron Man 2

dir: Jon Favreau

2010

Finally, a sequel to a superhero flick! The world is crying out for Part 2s. Part 2s are generally speaking, always better than Part 1s. Part 1s have all the horrible heavy lifting to do in terms of establishing an iconic character’s origins and motivations, which generally makes anything else that happens superfluous.

Part Deuxes only have to refer to those origins in the opening credits, and then it’s all away-we-go. And is thus better because, after all, who wants all that baggage?

Baggage-handlers, that’s who. They live for baggage. Also, customs people, drug smugglers and the thieves that work in airports, they all love baggage.

The rest of us, though, just want to skip the entree and get to the main course.

Iron Man 2 is the rare Marvel Part 2 that extends but doesn’t exceed its initial installment: of that I mean the current crop of superhero flicks that have been coming out recently which have generally done pretty well with the follow-up installment. Most people, I think, would agree that Spider-Man 2 was significantly better than either 1 or 3, and X-Men 2 is still the best of four admittedly mediocre movies.

It’s definitely not a better flick than its predecessor, but the important thing is that it’s not substantially worse. That’s the most important criterion, for me. And the fact that it’s still very enjoyable and a lot of fun is icing on the cake. I suspect it’s not going to review as well, but will probably make plenty more money, but I could care less about any of that.

What I care about is whether I continue to find Robert Downey Jnr endlessly fascinating and charming as Tony Stark, and I certainly do.

In this iteration in the ongoing adventures of the Man with the Atomic Heart, Tony Stark is, if anything, even more arrogant and over-the-top. He’s even more flamboyantly out of control, and with good reason, arguably. The six months following his ‘outing’ of himself to the world as some kind of suited superhero has resulted in world peace. As he quips leaving a senate hearing, he’s successfully privatised world peace, and it’s thanks to him (with some help from the suit) that the world has been reshaped into a more benevolent, narcissistic, Starkian image.

But stories don’t thrive on everything being all right. They need conflict and drama and shenanigans transpiring. So the palladium reactor he created to keep himself alive that also powers the suit of sentient armour is slowly poisoning him. So the son of a former Stark Industries employee wants revenge on Tony Stark for something his dad did back in the 60s. So the US military wants the schematics for the Iron Man suit because it thinks it’s entitled to them under eminent domain, presumably. So one of Tony’s primary competitors in the military contracts field wants to steal the designs as well for pleasure and profit.

It would seem to be enough. And it is enough, perhaps it’s too much, but the different sub-plots and threads, which are really just one big extruded strudel of a plot, are handled with different degrees of success.

Bringing the notoriously nutty Mickey Rourke into this high-tech mix would seem to be a dangerous path to take, but he does okay most of the time when he’s not actually doing anything. When he gets to mumble in a very thick Russian accent, he sounds ominous. Dangerous. Like someone who really wants to hurt Tony Stark.

The reality is far different. Even though we’re given a scene early on which is supposed to establish that he’s a credible threat, as in, someone with the skills, technology and motivation to severely fuck up Stark and his world, he really doesn’t seem that dangerous. Sure, he’s got these wicked glowing whips, but they look like something the fire-twirling, hoola-hooping and juggling set would twirl around for fun at the next equinox – full moon party. And does anyone believe they’re going to be able to wreck the suit, anyway?

It means, as well, that the strange thing about this action flick is that most of the film is not devoted to action. I’m okay with that. The first set piece at the Monaco grand prix is, after all, pretty fucking silly.

If you disagree, then come up with a good reason as to why anyone would drive a car onto a racetrack where Formula 1 cars are travelling the opposite way at speeds close to 300 kilometres an hour.

And the climactic battle is suitably pointless in that way that climactic battles generally are. But in between there’s a lot of wrangling, dramatic stuff, revelations about people’s identities and their life’s work, and a fight between best friends, all of which I don’t think is to the flick’s detriment.

The problem is that these ‘best’ bits don’t really have that much to do with the main villain, which makes his presence in the flick kind of pointless too.

One of the only actors not to return, being Terrence Howard, is either a man of tremendous character / greed (to walk after not having his pay demands met), or just a man who knew the flick wasn’t going to do him any favours. Sure, he would have known that the best friend / sidekick character of USAF Col Jim Rhodes / War Machine would have an expanded role to play in future adventures, but maybe he just wants the quiet life and smaller roles in flicks starring 50 Cent.

Whatever the reason, he walked, and Don Cheadle was brought in to play the role. He brings a significantly different take on the role, perhaps to the role’s detriment. He is a great actor, make no mistake, but he brings a whiny tone to the performance that’s only obviated by the truly wonderful occasion of having to step up to take Tony down a peg or two.

Anyone familiar with the character knows that booze is Iron Man’s kryptonite, and whilst it doesn’t play that big a role in the story, it certainly contributes to the key scene in the middle of the flick where Rhodey and Tony battle it out because Tony’s acting like a drunken arsehole at his own birthday party.

It’s a good scene, and probably my favourite of the pure action / effects driven scenes in the flick. The rest of the film’s virtues depend, at pretty much all times, on the motor-mouthed delivery of dialogue coming out of Tony Stark’s mouth.

And what a motored mouth it truly is. So much bullshit pours forth from Downey’s mouth that you can’t help but wonder how much of it was actually in the script, and how much of it just pops into his head and out of his mouth. I’m sure all of it was scripted, since a flick like this, costing as much as it does, has no room for improvisation. But I also get the feeling it’s almost impossible for any director, least of all Jon Favreau, to get Downey to do what they want him to do. It seems to me it’s more likely that you just steer him in the direction you want and hope he gets there eventually, if it so pleases him.

It’s hard to differentiate between whether it’s the dialogue itself (Justin Theroux’s script seems like it was painstakingly constructed for maximum nerdishness / hilarity), or just the delivery. I liked it, I found it consistently entertaining, and I especially like the fact that whilst the character himself is not one you could call edgy (Iron Man doesn’t lend itself to gothic introspection or the like; the character was created as a thinly veiled all-American hero to battle the Cold War menace of all those awful Communists, for crying out loud), the film doesn’t shy away from depicting him as an arsehole, and having the people around him call him out for it.

Other elements I liked tremendously involve the parts with Tony, guided by S.H.I.E.L.D boss Nick Fury (Sam Motherfucking L. Jackson), solving his own problems through his own skills, involving the creation of a new element, and the appearance of Howard Stark, Tony’s father, through some old films recorded for a New York expo back in the 1970s. John Slattery, who’s thoroughly awesome as Roger Sterling on Mad Men, is just as keen in a very brief role. Pepper (Gwyneth Paltrow) and Tony have just the same dynamic going on, especially from the perspective of having her sound perpetually irritated with Tony’s antics, and sounding pissed off that he doesn’t realise how much work is involved in cleaning up his messes.

The effects are very strong, as you would hope for a flick costing so many hundreds of millions to put together. Apart from the animation of the Iron Man / War Machine suits, which is superb, there are extended scenes involving Tony working stuff out through the use of holographic technology, which I thought looked great (other reviewers have singled it out as being too derivative of other recent sci-flicks like Minority Report and the like, but I think they’re being picky bitches)

There are practically too many actors in this to bother enumerating, but I will single out Scarlett Johansson for looking good in tight clothing, Scarlett Johansson’s stunt person for looking great in those fight scenes towards the end, and Sam Rockwell as a very grandiose but incompetent rival. As villainous military industrialists go, he’s pretty much an American version of David Brent from The Office. And no, an American version thereof is not Michael Scott.

Rockwell is pretty funny, but doesn’t really have anything to do apart from squirm uncomfortably beneath Stark’s withering gaze and quips, or threaten Mickey Rourke’s Ivan Vanko character pointlessly, not realising that a man covered in Russian prison tattoos should not be trifled with. As a self-aggrandising twit without Tony’s genius-level engineering abilities, he’s a decent foil even if he’s not a credible foe.

Far more odious, and far more slimy is Gary Shandling as a resentful US Senator, who hates Stark with a passion, and does everything in his meagre power to take Tony’s toys away from him. Despite the fact that he looks like his face is made of some kind of flesh-coloured cheese at film’s end, he gets a beauty of a line to finish the proceedings on.

It’s fun, it’s just silly dumb fun but with an enjoyable and likable set of characters at its core. It almost doesn’t matter what the threat is, so Tony’s battles with mindless versions of himself at the end of the flick don’t really resonate and don’t really matter. What matters is that Robert Downey Jnr is such a perfect Tony Stark that it’s as much fun watching him putting up a Hope and Change-era Obama-like rendering of Iron Man on the wall, and arguing with his various robotic appendages, as it is watching a CGI version of him flying through the sky and fighting evil robots.

This was never going to be a Dark Knight version of Iron Man. No-one was expecting that, were they? Then what are you complaining about, complainers?

7 ways in which he’s the cool exec with a heart of steel, ablaze with power out of 10

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“All I have to do is sit here and watch, as the world will consume you” – that’s what happens when you’re a Nietschean – Ayn Rand style superman: the little people all try to take a bite out of you, Iron Man 2