Archive for April 4th, 2012|Daily archive page
Iron Man 2 (2010)
Iron Man 2
★★★★☆
Directed by: Jon Favreau
Written by: Justin Theroux
Based on the Comic Book Created by: Stan Lee, Don Heck, Larry Leiber, Jack Kirby
I think it would be fair to say that I was as surprised by Iron Man 2 as I was by the original Iron Man. I always liked Iron Man comics as a kid. In the 90s when everyone was rabid about Jim Lee’s run on X-Men and hyperventilating over Spawn and Youngblood and the new Image comics, I—well, I was right there with them. Look, the 90s weren’t great for comics. But I also spent an awful lot of my money on dirt cheap back issues of Iron Man, because as much as I liked the other, more popular heroes like Spider-Man and Batman, something about a guy who strapped on an awesome suit of techno-armor appealed to the burgeoning gadget nerd inside of me.
I never thought I’d see a big-budget Iron Man movie get made, and even when it did I didn’t think it would be very good. So I was pretty stunned when Robert Downey, Jr. turned in a magnificent Tony Stark performance and they pretty much nailed the character, the story and the production. Good for them, I thought at the time, they got lucky. It was this sense of fortuitous accident that I got from the first that led me to believe the sequel could never be as good and thus I pretty much ignored it until recently, seeing an ad for The Avengers, I got kind of amped to see more super hero flicks, even terrible ones.
So I found myself watching Iron Man 2. And it turns out, it was no accident that the first Iron Man was good.
Iron Man 2 picks up basically where the first left off (it’s a few months later), with Tony Stark as the rock star CEO/super protector of world peace, admired by all, so long as you except congress and the military who want Stark to turn over his Iron Man tech as a patriotic duty. Stark ignores their cries and clings tightly to the suit, which, along with his palladium replacement heart, is slowly killing him. The revelation of his impending death sends Stark on a sort of death mission, handing over CEO duties to Pepper Potts (still played with prim affection by Gwyneth Paltrow) and taking heavy risks like driving the car he sponsors in the Monaco Grand Prix himself.
Enter Ivan Vanko (apparently also called Whiplash, thought it doesn’t seem to come up in the movie, played with punk rock flamboyance by Mickey Rourke), son of Stark’s dad’s ex-partner who helped develop the tech that drives Tony’s suit and Iron Man. Bent for revenge for perceived crimes against his father, Vanko confronts Stark/Iron Man with a semi-suit of his own. This kicks off a firestorm as Stark’s assurances that Iron Man tech was so far ahead of the curve it would never be eclipsed are proven false and Stark continues his downward slide as pressure increases.
The plot gets pretty convoluted from there: not so much that you can’t keep up, just so that it kind of spirals into a disjointed series of events that you kind of have to hang on through because they do all tie together in the end. Lt. Col. James Rhodes (“Rhodey,” played to clipped perfection by Don Cheadle, stepping in for Terrence Howard from the first) confiscates a backup suit from Stark’s lab; Stark’s new assistant, Natalie Rushman (Black Widow, played with curiously un-alluring hot/cool sexuality by Scarlett Johanssen) loops Nick Fury (played by professional scenery chewer, Samuel L. Jackson) into the deal, where he provides the macguffin necessary for Stark to recover and to propel some nice character development; Stark business rival Justin Hammer (played with effectively whiny villainous arrogance by Sam Rockwell) breaks Vanko out of prison and hires him to perfect his own version of the Iron Man suit and the stage is (mostly) set for the epic finale.
Let me just say that director Jon Favreau’s sense of pacing is precise in this movie. So many other super hero sequels stumble by trying to cram too much into a movie just because they already have the backstory covered, but despite the complexity hinted at by the paragraph above, it actually flows very nicely together with minor set pieces and some smart, funny dialogue propelling even the non-SFX portions. And kudos to the screenwriters for avoiding the temptation to cram extraneous villains into the screenplay; Justin Hammer is an ideal foil to Stark on the personal/professional side and while Vanko/Whiplash isn’t exactly a humdinger of a foe for Iron Man, the finale is as explosive and exciting as you could really want from a summer blockbuster. A massive hat tip for including War Machine, too, which is every bit as cool as its name implies.
Are there problems in Iron Man 2? Sure. Some of the rapid-fire dialogue isn’t quite as smart or as funny as its supposed to be (though a lot of it actually is), there are a few too many shots of Rhodey and Stark’s faces with blinking Iron Man lights flashing on their faces and the Pepper Potts storyline wrap-up feels like a rehash from the first. But any movie that has super-powered future tech like the Iron Man suit in it and still manages to make Black Widow’s infiltration of Hammer Industries look badass (and provide one of the movie’s funniest scenes/lines to boot) has something really good going on.
I thoroughly enjoyed Iron Man 2 and while I’m not sure that lightning can strike three times (Iron Man 3 is supposedly coming out in 2013, though without Favreau at the helm), I’m not going to be so quick to dismiss next time.