Movie Review: Iron Man 2

Iron Man 2 (2010)

This is a movie that I keep going back to and flip-flopping on how much I like it. It most certainly one of the weaker MCU movies, and a lot less solid than its predecessor, but it's actually nowhere as messy as I remembered it to be. The problem with this movie, I think, is that it tries to do too many things at the same time, and we haven't quite gotten the whole 'pacing' thing down yet. 

I guess I will get the biggest criticism out of the way first -- easily the weakest part of this movie is the poor villain. Ivan Vanko (Michael Rourke) is noted to have a lot of scenes written and filmed, but basically all of them got cut out and removed from the movie and he gets turned into Russian-villains-speak-funny for the entire movie. And... and I'll admit, Rourke's performance is hilarious in a lot of his deliveries. "Software shit." "I want my bird." "Make salute." But... but the movie's first scenes opens up with Ivan Vanko in grief as he witnesses his drunkard father Anton die. Ivan's whole motivation throughout the movie is that he views Tony's father Howard Stark as an ungrateful bastard who deported Anton back to Russia and stole the credit for the arc reactor's design as his sole creation. And the awesome speech about how he "made God bleed" by showing to the world that the invincible Iron Man is vulnerable in public? Hell, even the team-up as the more dangerous subordinate recruited by the toothless businessman villain Justin Hammer is an interesting dynamic! But all of this honestly leads to a pretty awesome build-up... that really goes nowhere.

After the prison breakout he basically hangs out in Hammer's factories making the Hammeroid drones and essentially undermining Justin Hammer's authority, then he basically becomes a generic final villain in the Stark Expo that has to be stopped because he blows stuff up. Honestly, even his final defeat felt like a huge anticlimax to me. And the sad thing is that we really could've gotten a lot out of Whiplash that ties into Tony's own arc in the movie if only it was incorporated better. The themes of vulnerability and legacy runs pretty strong in this movie, and both Tony and Ivan is driven heavily by what their fathers had (or hadn't) done, and we could've had something out of it. But instead Tony's character arc basically goes off independently as he barely gets any interaction with his antagonist... who, from Tony's point of view, is just 'that guy that attacked him in the racetrack once' and 'that guy who's hijacking the robots'. Compared to all of Tony's other antagonists in the MCU, he and Ivan have very little in terms of confrontation, which is ironic because with Ivan's backstory he's probably the one with the most interesting reason to go after Tony. 

...that said, how badass is that race-track scene? I still remember Whiplash very, very fondly for that scene alone. 

Another plot thread that I felt didn't have an adequate payoff is James Rhodes. Rhodey -- recasted as Don Cheadle in this movie for the rest of the MCU -- is extremely charismatic and easily one of the best supporting characters in the entire franchise. And, like Ivan Vanko, he also gets a very great first half of the movie! This builds up on what we've seen with Rhodey in the first movie; that Rhodey is Tony Stark's under-appreciated and long-suffering friend who keeps sticking his neck out to help Tony because of his friendship and his position, but he ends up seeing that Tony, well... he's not the most responsible or appreciative. There's a nice storyline that goes on here about how he genuinely cares about Tony, but since Tony keeps pushing him and Pepper out of the way because of his alcoholism and other problems, Rhodey snaps. And you can't really blame him with the sorry sight that Tony is in during the party, making a fool out of himself and quite literally pissing his super-expensive Iron Man suit in front of a gaggle of vapid guests. Ultimately, Rhodey steals the Mark II armour from the first movie, fights Tony a bit, before handing it over to the U.S. military.

And this, again, leads to a pretty interesting setup... that goes nowhere. By the time of the climax, Tony worked his own problems out with minimal input from Rhodey (beyond the proverbial slap in the face when Rhodey stole his armour). Everything goes on well as Iron Man and War Machine both act as genuinely badass superheroes... and while it isn't as terrible or abrupt as Ivan Vanko, beyond them making it up through the events of in-battle banter, Tony and Rhodey just... sort of shrugged off their conflict. It's something that I feel is realistic for these two characters, admittedly, especially with their very strong BFF-bros vibe, but I really did feel like we could've gotten something more. 

And... and that said, this movie still has a pretty solid plot. Mostly for Tony Stark himself and building up all the secondary characters for The Avengers (which is a smart thing to do). It's just that it's kind of choppily edited and Whiplash's story, as noted above, isn't the best at carrying the story itself. Tony Stark himself is introduced basically 'privatizing world peace' with his armour, publicly stopping many crimes, bamboozling a bunch of government senators' attempts to take the Iron Man armour, and making huge showcases as he sets up a modern-day Stark Expo. 

But Tony Stark is hiding the fact that his arc reactor's palladium core is slowly degrading and poisoning him, and he's got limited time. This is his main problem throughout this movie, a stand-in for the iconic alcoholism he has in the comics, as Tony basically goes increasingly reckless and depressed about his impending death but refusing to show weakness in front of anybody. After all, every huge gesture he does -- like appointing Pepper as CEO out of the blue, or the impulsive bit in Monaco where he rides a F-1 car -- could be seen as him just 'oh hey another waaaacky Tony Stark thing!' Most importantly -- and something that actually gets subtly followed up in multiple Avengers movies in the future -- he doesn't tell anyone he's dying and he keeps everything bottled up inside and refuses to confide to anyone. Not his best friend Rhodes, and not his girlfriend Pepper.

Life punches Tony in the gut, though, because, well, during the Grand Prix, Ivan Vanko shows up with his own perfected arc reactor and nearly kills Stark publicly if Happy and Pepper hadn't driven in and tossed him the Mark V suitcase armour. Tony won that battle, but his vulnerability is made apparent not just to the world, but even more heavily to Stark himself. He gets really drunk in his final birthday party, and embarrasses himself which leads to the Tony/Rhodey confrontation. 

As he continues lashing out and hanging out inside of a giant donut, he ends up meeting with a bunch of SHIELD agents. Nick Fury (Samuel L. Jackson), Director of SHIELD shows up to give Tony some tough love, coupled with Agent Coulson (Clark Gregg) from the first movie and Natasha "Black Widow" Romanoff (Scarlet Johansson), who had spent the first half of the movie infiltrating Stark Industries as she worms her way into being Stark's new secretary, something that's pretty fun because we all like Black Widow... but also honestly ends up being a redundant plot other than introducing us to Natasha a bit early. 

And... and in the second act of the movie we basically have Tony Stark force himself to look back at his clouded memories of Howard. Sure, Howard might actually be a negligent and hard father, but the videos that Tony sees shows that he's not as invincible or as perfect as Tony makes him out to be. It's a nice moment of nice admitted vulnerability on Howard's part, and I think Tony realizes that deep down he doesn't have to pretend to be unbeatable and invincible all the time. From a more serious plotline stuff, we get some technobabble mumbo-jumbo as Howard helps Tony create a new element that will fix the poisoning, that Howard basically figured out the first steps of and Tony ends up finishing. Robert Downey Jr is a fun actor and his performance is always fun, but while I did enjoy this sequence I do have to admit that it's easily the weak part of the movie.

Oh, and it's at this point in the movie that Howard off-handedly notes Anton Vanko's actual crimes, which... is never touched up in Tony's confrontation with Ivan, and it's not relevant to anything that really happens in this movie other than to make the audience feel less bad when Ivan gets killed at the end? I guess? I don't know. It's just so much wasted potential here. 

That's basically, I guess, the crux of Tony's storyline here. He makes peace, however messily, with his obsession with his dad's legacy and leaving one behind for his own, and he admits to Pepper later on that he will confide in her more. We get a long, extended action scene of Iron Man and War Machine fighting against the small army of Vanko-controlled Hammeroids in the Stark Expo, which is always cool because seeing robots fight each other is basically the best action movie experience ever. Snuck into this whole thing is a sub-plot of Happy driving Natasha Romanoff to Hammer Industries, where she gets a badass scene beating up all the Hammer guards, before deactivating the control of the War Machine armour. Natasha's pretty cool in the scenes we get to see of her, but it's clear, honestly, that like most of the characters in the movie, she's treated as an action set-piece first and a character second. It's a bit more all right for Black Widow to not have a huge storyline beyond just being a badass SHIELD agent, though. 

Let's go over the secondary characters I haven't touched upon a bit quickly, yeah? Justin Hammer (Sam Rockwell) is another very memorable part of the movie. Hammer tries to set himself up as the new Tony Stark, trying to model himself off of Stark and pretend that he's this suave businessman that swaggers around and can rule the room. Except he's kind of a dorky loser, and while the plan to fake Ivan Vanko's death and have him stick around to make armours for him is actually not a bad one, it's pretty clear early on in their relationship that Ivan's the threat here. Hammer gives us some of the best moments of comedy at his expense, and I actually did like how he's portrayed in this movie. 

Pepper... Pepper gets to do a bit more in this movie, though she honestly gets lost with how many plot points and characters that run around here. She gets to become the new CEO of Stark Industries, she gets involved more readily in the mid-movie action scenes and the final climax (she essentially arrests Hammer) and we get that fun little mutual respect thing with secretary!Natasha and the pretty well-acted bit where Tony not-confides in her... but ultimately she's just kind of there. Again, the performance is pretty well-done and she gets a couple of neat individual scenes, but she's just kind of there.

Other supporting characters in this movie include a bigger role on Happy Hogan's (Jon Favreau) part, though it mostly amounts to comedy. Him being shown up twice by Black Widow in the movie is fun, and he gets to totally run down Whiplash in the racetrack. Nick Fury is pretty damn cool in his limited screentime, and while I certainly wished that we could've gotten more Fury; Fury's (and, by extension, Black Widow's and Coulson's) relatively limited and standalone screentimes in this movie as the good government spy agency is done succinctly enough. They have enough of a presence in the movie to lead to the Avengers-foreshadowing scenes at the end, but they didn't become a massive distracting plot tumour from the whole Palladium/Hammer/Vanko storyline. 

And... honestly, there's a lot here that could be improved, I think, and the sequel movies are apparently the ones that get hit with the biggest examples of executive meddling. Still, if nothing else, this movie is pretty fun to watch because while the storytelling and pacing isn't the best, the action scenes and the comedy works pretty well. And even then, it also builds up these characters for subsequent movies, which is a always a nice consolation prize for most of these MCU movies. Not the best movie, but not the worst either. 

Marvel Easter Eggs Corner:

• Post Credits Scene: Phil Coulson drives up to see Thor's hammer Mjolnir on the ground, while a crowd of people gathers around it. 
  
• Stan the Man: Stan Lee shows up as Larry King in one of Tony's parties. 
• Future Movies Foreshadowing: In addition to more references to the Avengers' Initiative, we also get Fury and Coulson talking about something in the South-West region (where Thor takes place). Also, Captain America's shield shows up as Tony is making his new element, though as a gag he uses it just as a prop. It's hard to see, but the notebook of Howard Stark contains notes on the Tesseract. The map of metahuman activity shows markers in Africa and the ocean, foreshadowing Black Panther and most likely a little nod to Namor. 
• A bit of a cheat because it most certainly isn't planned out when this movie was filmed, but the little kid in the Iron Man mask has been basically retconned into being a young Peter Parker.
• Movie Superhero Codenames: Rhodes is referred to by his military rank the entire movie,  though we do get a 'you wanna be the war machine?' line from Tony. I don't think 'Black Widow' or 'Whiplash' are said at any time in the movie. 
• Favourite Action Scene: A tough one to choose, but I'll have to say Iron Man and War Machine's badass back-to-back pose in that Japanese garden against an army of Hammeroids. Whiplash in the racetrack is a very close contender, though. 
• Funniest Line: Less of a line and more of a scene; but Happy spending five minutes to dirty-box a single security guard down while Black Widow effortlessly super-spy kung-fu's two entire corridors and off-handedly pepper-spraying the last one.
• The storyline here has shades of the iconic 'Demon in a Bottle' arc from the comics, with shades of 'Armor Wars'. 
• During the final conversation between Stark and Fury, a monitor talks about a crisis on the Culver University, which takes place in The Incredible Hulk's mid-way point. Since Stark accepts his job as SHIELD's consultant here, this leads into Stark's appearance at the final scene of that movie.
• Happy Hogan rescuing Tony Stark at a crashed car race is how the two characters met each other in the comics.
• Tony keeping his armour in an attache case is how he carries his suit in some of the earliest issues of Iron Man comics. 
• Anton Vanko (Ivan's dad) is the name of the Iron Man nemesis Crimson Dynamo. Whiplash is basically an amalgamation of Crimson Dynamo and Blacklash.
• Ivan's fake ID tag at the race track pegs him as 'Boris Turgenov', the name of the second Crimson Dynamo.
• Hammer calls the War Machine armour a 'variable threat response battlesuit', the original designation of the War Machine armour in the comics.