Iron Man2
I spent a few cycles trying to figure out how to artfully plug my novel here in the opening of this review, but I gave up and wrote this sentence instead. Come by and check it out, let me know what you think!
It’s unlikely, I think, that anyone who liked the first Iron Man movie will walk out of this one thinking “that sucked.” It doesn’t suck. It’s very well put-together and in many ways it makes more sense than the first one.
The first movie did so much work in the first two acts getting us to believe in the reality of Tony Stark and the Iron Man armor that, when things inevitably broke down in the third act and people started behaving in ways that only make sense if we assume they knew they were in an Iron Man movie, we forgave them.
That’s filmmaking. That’s not a flaw, it’s a feature. They did the work, they got us to buy in, and when we did, it let them handwave some hard stuff so we could sit back and watch two guys in suits of high-tech armor beating the shit out of each other.
Iron Man 2 doesn’t have that problem. When we get to the climax, we not only know what’s coming, as we did in the first movie, we believe it. We know why Mickey Roarke wants to kill Robert Downey Jr. He didn’t just look around, shrug, and say “Well, I guess I have to kill you now,” the way Jeff Bridges did in the first movie.
I’m not saying we never see people behaving in “I’ve Read The Script” ways. When Rhodey decides to go put on a suit of Iron Man armor so he can…you know what, I’m not entirely sure what the writers thought I would think he thought he was going to do. It seemed dumb. It seemed like an otherwise smart person doing something stupid that was just going to make things worse, which it did. Sure I wanted to see Rhodey in the suit, and the writers knew it and so kinda handwaved that part. I’m just saying the climax of the film doesn’t depend on that kind of intertia, and this is an improvement.
Another improvement is the cast. I love Mickey Roarke, and I love Sam Rockwell. Roarke is a genius, and Rockwell is an actor’s actor. It’s a joy to watch either of them when they’re engaged in their work, and they both bring their A-game to this movie.
Roarke is completely believable as Ivan Vanko. It’s impossible to watch him, and not feel what he’s feeling. Not believe that he is what the movie tells us he is. A Russian gangster and thug, a criminal, a loving son, an obsessed maniac, a brilliant physicist. In the Spider Man movies, this character would be all those things, and 21 years old. And I would slowly disengage. Because the characters in Iron Man arrive on screen having already lead a life, it’s somewhat more plausible to believe in the young Russian wunderkind who spent the 15 years Tony Stark spent boozing and carousing on the cover of magazines, in a Russian prison earning the tattoos we see.
Don Cheadle is an equally impressive actor. I first fell in love with him watching him do a scathing attack against racism in an all-singing, all-dancing fantasy sequence as Sammy Davis Jr. in HBO’s Rat Pack movie. I saw that number and thought “I will watch this dude in anything he’s in.” It’s such a tragedy he’s so wrong for this part.
Maybe it’s not his fault. The first movie did so much work establishing the friendship and rapport between Stark and Rhodey. We believed in it, primarily through the agency of the humanity of the actors. Terence Howard is an actor who wears his heart on his sleeve. Even when he’s trying to contain his feelings, his love and admiration and contempt, for Stark, we see it.
Cheadle is exactly the opposite actor. He’s all about deeply concealed feelings that occasionally erupt like a volcano. They’re two different actors, two different techniques, and as a result, these are two different James Rhodeses. If you’re going to completely change the characterization, you need to redo all that work. Instead, Cheadle walks into his first scene expecting us to just assume all the work Terence Howard did, counts for him as well. That’s a mistake.
If there is a weak link in this movie, it’s Cheadle. We know Rhodey and Stark are friends because the script says so, because we’ve seen the first movie. But we didn’t see Don Cheadle go from dressing Tony down on Stark’s private jet, to getting completely shitfaced with him on that same jet fifteen minutes later. And I’m not convinced we would have seen Cheadle in that scene. We’d need a different scene, if it was him in the first movie. Or, at the very least, those scenes would take on different meaning. When Don Cheadle says “You can have your suit back,” he’s making a laconic quip, being light in the face of extreme danger. For Terence Howard, that line would be a confession.
But there’s so much fun to be had watching Mickey Roarke and Robert Downey Jr. get it on, watching Sam Rockwell be a complete douche–perfect casting–that we forgive the slight against Terence Howard and the character he created.
Roarke plays, as you know, Ivan Venko, the villain Whiplash. Wisely, these movies never refer to people by their Comic Book names, except as carefully constructed and completely inobtrusive nods to the fans in the audience. Rockwell plays a more deserpate, less talented version of Tony Stark: Justin Hammer. I read Iron Man back in the 1980s and I don’t remember those bad guys so I have no idea what the source material has to say about them. But in the context of the movies they both work great. They are great characters with clear motivations and we believe in them.
Whiplash has a long grudge to settle with Stark and Stark’s legacy, and Hammer is a competing arms merchant and when they team up to get Stark, it doesn’t feel like a movie with too many villains. Jon Favreau is not trotting out every Marvel character he can get his hands on, he’s keeping things tight. Scarlett Johansson as Black Widow…well, look, she’s fun to watch, she’s a great actress, it’s a great character. So the fact that I, sitting here thinking, realize you could probably have completely substracted her from the movie and no one would have noticed? That might be a problem on paper, but since it wasn’t a problem while I was watching, I cannot count it as a problem with the movie.
I’m often surprised to find out the rest of the world doesn’t love Gwenneth Paltrow the way I do. I have to presume its because not everyone saw Shakespeare in Love. But while Scarlett Johansson is sexier, I think Paltrow holds her own in the beauty department and I love watching her act. She is having fun and I think deserves second billing after Robert Downey Jr..
Of course the owners are setting up the Avenger Movie, which is one of the most ambitious projects in the history of film, so we get more of Nick Fury. There’s some too-convenient comic-book plotting where Everyone Important Knows Everyone, and I was left with the distinct impression that Sam Jackson didn’t belong in this movie. When he makes it clear that Tony is too unstable to be considered for membership in the Avengers, I felt like I was watching the owners of the IP hedging their bets. Keeping their options open.
The first act is largely about the aftermath of Tony’s announcement that there is an Iron Man weapon, and he is it. When he appears before the Senate, we get it. We’ve seen this scene before, we know all the players, including the ones we haven’t met yet, and we know how it’s going to play out. So, again, we go along with it. But I lament the absence of any real debate. I don’t mean, more dialog. I mean an opposing viewpoint. Really, any viewpoint. The film seems to establish that the US now relies on Iron Man to keep the world safe. That there’s no more terrorism, thanks to Iron Man. If that’s true, then it would be reasonable for the government to want some oversight especially if the suit was developed with government funding. Stark Industries was, after all, a huge contractor.
But there is no real debate, the movie doesn’t do the work to make us believe in either side of the argument. Tony doesn’t want to give the suit up because he’s read the script and knows he doesn’t have to. He’s Tony Stark and can do what he wants. The Senator doesn’t need to make a well-reasoned argument because he’s read the script and knows he’s there to give us someone to sneer at, and give Tony someone to make look stupid. Which we want to see, don’t we?
Finally, once everyone’s done their thing, it’s time for the big fight at the end of the movie. And while I believed in Roarke’s Vanko, and that he would do what we see him do, I felt like putting him in another suit of armor diminished him. Roarke is such a presence, compare his debut as Whiplash on the racetrack with the climactic battle. The former is far more memorable, mostly because we’re looking at actors’ faces and their real bodies. Whiplash’s tattoos are all the costume he needs, it’s such a crime to turn him into a special effect.
If these seem like minor quibbles, I feel the same way. The tone of the first movie is largely in evidence. I knew I was going to take exception to many little elements when I sat down just now to think about what I’d seen for the first time which I why I (unusually) front loaded my criticism with an endorsement. The Iron Man series is shaping up very nicely and while we’ve had genre movies since the first that were better films (The Dark Knight) and greater adventures (Star Trek) there’s a place in our summers for Iron Man.
So mote it be.
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(2 votes, average: 5.00 out of 5)
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May 17th, 2010 at 9:09 pm
Just watched this tonight and enjoyed it enormously. It’s incredible how real the non-superheroic scenes feel – like, this isn’t just a bunch of obligatory set-up before we get to watch bionic dudes punching each other, these are actual people living their lives. (I compare it favorably to, for instance, the first half-hour of The Dark Knight, which had me thinking that everyone who raved about the movie must be totally bonkers — Heath Ledgers’ first big scene came just in time to keep me from ejecting the DVD.)My only real complaint is that I would have liked for Tony and Pepper to have more uninterrupted face-sucking time at the end of the movie. Undercutting the big kiss is just as much of a cliché now as the big kiss itself, so why not just have the big kiss? Not that the banter wasn’t clever and all that you could hope for.And as a final random thought, I’m pretty sure this movie has the best "hot chick beats up a crapload of dudes" scene that I can ever remember seeing. Way better than "Barb Wire"!