Ironing Out The Details

When I was growing up, “sequel” was a dirty word. It was the heyday of Rambo, Rocky, Jason, Freddy, and “Police Academy.” I could count the number of sequels worth even a passing glance on one hand: “The Godfather, Part II,” “Evil Dead II,” “Star Trek II” “The Empire Strikes Back,” and “Aliens.”

These days, I need a couple extra hands. "Toy Story 2." "Spider-Man 2." "X-Men 2." And more recently, "The Dark Knight." Especially for comic book and fantasy movies, once filmmakers have divested themselves of the obligation to cram an origin story and an actual story into the same movie, sequels offer the chance to build on an established narrative foundation. Lately it seems it's that third “I” that’s the kiss of crap: witness “Batman Forever,” “Spider-Man 3” and “X3.”

So…Iron Man 2: eighties sequel, or oughts sequel?

The story picks up where the first one left off. Tony Stark (Robert Downey, Jr.) has made his double-life public, flaunting his alter ego at every opportunity. Without a righteous moral struggle, Iron Man has gone from avenging hero to marketing tool. He’s a hero, but a hollow one, a shell. Stark himself is riding high, not realizing how close he is to sliding back into his former narcissistic nihilism. Where the first movie was - in some scenes literally – a battle for Tony Stark’s (electric) heart and, in a way, the story of Stark’s war against himself, the second begins with him finally feeling whole.

So you know that won't last for long.

As in the first film, the unintended consequences of Stark’s actions are the engine that drives the plot. In this case, those consequences take the form of formerly-imprisoned Russian genius scientist and Bond-villain-level crazy guy Ivan Vanko, played by a metal-toothed and bizarrely accented Mickey Rourke. Stark’s father stole some of Vanko's ideas years earlier, then had Vanko deported to keep him from challenging the elder Stark’s patents on his inventions. So when Stark’s mysterious industrialist rival Justin Hammer (a wonderfully slimy Sam Rockwell) approaches Vanko with stolen Stark Industries blueprints and asks him to build a prototype that can compete with the Iron Man armor, Vanko gets to work building himself an ugly but effective exoskeleton complete with 12-foot-long laser whips.

Naturally.

By the time Vanko unveils his creation in the most visceral of the movie’s action set-pieces, a Formula One race Stark is competing in for charity, Stark’s world has already started unravelling. A seductive new employee, Natasha Romanov (a crimson-tressed Scarlett Johansson) is turning Stark’s head at the office and arousing the suspicions of his ever-faithful girl Friday Pepper Potts (a returning Gwyneth Paltrow, again adding warmth and depth to a role that could easily have been thankless and demeaning); he discovers that the arc reactor in his chest, the thing that’s supposed to be keeping him alive, is actually killing him; and while he’s still reeling from the race track attack, he’s assaulted by a squadron of soldiers in armor eerily similar to his own. After barely escaping with his life, he finds out the attack is a direct result of his refusal to turn over his Iron Man technology to the DOD. Instead, Defense went into business with Hammer, who used the same stolen Stark technology he gave to Vanko to land a contract for an army of armored supersoldiers. This information stokes Stark’s moral fire and his goal comes into focus: to regain control of his technology and to track down the mole who has been delivering it into the proverbial “wrong hands.”

Now on the defensive against Vanko, Hammer, the U.S Government, and an internal mole, Stark enlists the services of his estranged friend, James “Rhodey” Rhodes to help him dig his way out of the morass he find himself in. In the film’s one recast role, Don Cheadle, a fine actor, ably replaces Terrence Howard as Rhodey, although I personally preferred Howard. Cheadle has great range, but is almost too sympathetic to play a career military officer – even one who goes out drinking with Tony Stark. Against Rhodey’s protests, Stark convinces him to don a souped-up version of the silver Mark II armor from the first film. Because if one Iron Man is good, two is better. Right, Movie?

While this “more is more” approach has been the downfall of many a sequel before it, Iron Man 2 avoids many potential pitfalls by following the model of its immediate predecessor and embracing its own “pop-ness.” This is not a movie that pretends to be anything more than a pleasing distraction, and benefits massively from that lack of pretension. The tragic tendency of the tentpole franchises of the last ten years is that over time, they begin to take themselves too seriously. The maudlin histrionics of Spider-Man 3 and the over-explanation of Jack Sparrow come immediately to mind. While Iron Man 2 ups the stakes from the first movie significantly, and the pathos is enough to keep the audience invested in the characters, Favreau and crew never skimp on the gee-whiz-pop-boom-bang pyrotechnics. In short, it’s a B-level movie with an A-level treatment, just like the first film. It’s popcorn entertainment – but with real butter, not concession stand gasoline.

-Aaron


Iron Man 2: Secret of The Ooze comes out 5/7/2010