In its best
moments, and pretty much all of them were best moments, the original Iron Man
felt like a direct extension of its main character, snazzy and charming and way
smarter than it lets on. It's probably a bad sign, then, that Iron Man 2 opens
not with the dashing and magnetic Tony Stark, but with blue-filtered
cinematography and a crashing, Dark Knight-reminiscent score as we meet Ivan
Vanko (Mickey Rourke), the Russian crazyperson who may as well have the word
"VILLAIN" strewn in among his many tattoos.
Ivan's
introduction only takes up the opening credits, and it's barely any time at all
before we're tossed into the tawdry excess of the Stark Expo, but the precedent
has been set-- Iron Man 2 is constantly, almost unintentionally, moving away
from its central character, and it suffers for it throughout. Tony Stark spends
most of the movie in a slump, poisoned from the inside by the core reactor
that's keeping him alive and dealing, maybe a little belatedly, with some daddy
issues. Everyone around him, from rival industrialist Justin Hammer (Sam
Rockwell) to newly appointed Stark Industries CEO Pepper Potts (Gwyneth
Paltrow), is keeping busy, but Tony, who seemed to develop a conscience at the
end of the first film, is right back to the same old motivation of booze and
women. Robert Downey Jr., marvel that he is, manages to make even Tony's
stupidest, most selfish antics endearing, but it's almost as if he realized his
character-- the title character!-- had been written as a passive bystander, and
he had to work double time to make up for it.
That's all fine
in the film's first 45 minutes, which introduce Vanko's evil revenge plan, show
off Tony's boundless charm at a tense Senate committee hearing, and lead into
the film's first, and probably best, action sequence, when Whiplash interrupts
a Monte Carlo car race to attack Tony with beautifully realized electrical
whips. Preceded by a long and elegant party scene that sets up the film's many
rivalries and capped by a comic getaway for Pepper Potts and right-hand man
Happy (Favreau himself), the Monte Carlo sequence is everything Iron Man does
best: fluid storytelling, over-the-top enjoyable action, inventive gadgets, and
humor thrown it at precisely the right moments.
Unfortunately
it's another solid forty five minutes before we reach the next action scene,
and it's a colossal misstep that throws the entire film off its game. Tony's
military pal Rhodey (Don Cheadle now, Terrence Howard last time) is fed up with
his friend's drunken antics and shows up at Tony's birthday party to reclaim
the suit, but Tony is too busy DJ-ing in his suit and doing party trick. I
won't spoil the details, but you probably already know that War Machine makes
an appearance in this film, and well...you see where this is going.
From there Tony
is occupied by a Da Vinci Code-esque hunt through his father's old documents,
which leads pretty much nowhere, while Hammer and Vanko team up, Rhodey
questions his allegiance to his friend, and Tony's comely new assistant Natasha
(Scarlett Johansson) is revealed to have another employer-- let's just say,
Marvel fans, that he wears an eyepatch. It's a lot to keep track of, but Iron Man
2, despite its failings, avoids the villain overload that has felled any number
of superhero sequels, and all the pieces are set nicely into place for the
final showdown. The problem with all of it, though, is that it just doesn't
really matter. Ivan Vanko seems set on nothing but avenging the death of his
father that he believes Howard Stark caused, and Hammer, annoying as he is,
isn't a villain-- he's just Tony's business competition. The first film found
Tony Stark getting over his petty business concerns and learning to fight for
the greater good, but Iron Man 2 puts us exactly where we started, getting
worked up about things like intellectual property theft and who slept with that
cute Vanity Fair reporter first. It's fun and glamorous and all, but we've
generally come to expect more from our superheroes.
Iron Man 2 was
very publicly made in a rush, and it shows-- the script suffers from long
stretches of nothing but dialogue scenes, and character arcs that should have
connected the whole film show up crammed into scenes, just to make sure they
fit into whatever happens in the sequel. That's never more apparent than all
the scenes involving Samuel L. Jackson's Nick Fury and S.H.I.E.L.D.; the entire
agency was introduced only after the credits of the first film, but going into
this one we're expected to understand the purpose of S.H.I.E.L.D., where Iron
Man might fit into the Avengers, and even why a maverick like Tony Stark would
want to be in that superhero club. Jackson's mighty over-acting and Clark
Gregg's smarmy Agent Coulson give these S.H.I.E.L.D. scenes a little zip, but
they're effectively just another distracting subplot in a film that could have
stood to drop a few.
Tony Stark is
practically alone among modern movie superheroes in that he suffers very little
self doubt, charging ahead with his plans, damn the torpedoes and that sensible
Pepper Potts. If only we could say the same of the sequel that surrounds him, a
movie that is so good when it pulls itself together, but is frequently too
disorganized or uncertain to soar to the same heights as the first film.
There's plenty in to enjoy, and overall Iron Man 2 provides more entertainment,
guilt-free, than anything you're likely to see this summer. But based on the
first film and many sections of this one, we had reason to expect even more.
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