So, after waiting two years to get another couple of hours to hang out with our rich, eccentric, acerbic buddy, obviously the first thing the audience wants to see in the sequel is…Mickey Rourke’s elderly father dying in a Russian slum?
I wish I could put my finger on the problem with this film. Structurally, there are some odd choices, like the aforementioned burial of the lead, and there are a couple of truly bizarre tonal shifts – the event that gets Rhodey (now played by Don Cheadle as a man would believes cracking a smile is tantamount to treason) is at once nail-bitingly scary and utterly laughable. But I think ultimately the movie’s true flaw is that everyone involved succumbed to the standard blockbuster sequel mentality that more is more. Too much is crammed into one story. The fact that I’m not entirely sure that’s the problem with it is a testimony to how good everyone involved is – with the possible exception of alleged wunderkind screenwriter Justin Theroux. Some of the dialogue is Saturday morning cartoon-level bad, and a number of scenes are downright dull (thrill as our villain watches TV and types on a keyboard!). Despite that, this thing comes so close to working, it’s more frustrating than if it had been a “Batman and Robin”-style catastrophe.
My main problem is that I want to go up to Favreau, give him a cigar (to soften him up a bit; he’s a big dude with a lot of money), and say, “Hey, man, where’s the fun?” The first Iron Man opens like a party. Here we open on poverty, vodka, and a gnashing of teeth as genius madman Ivan Vanko (Rourke) embarks on a quest against Tony Stark for crimes Stark’s dad committed against his dad (a plot point I speculated about and nailed, by the way, thank you and you’re welcome). From there, we do go to a party. A huge one. Stark is soaking up the limelight in the center ring at Stark Expo, where he seems to have reverted back to the callous prick he was at the top of the first movie. This is the storyline that is played most elegantly by Downey. He makes Stark’s bravado is more aggressive than before. Tony’s still trying to be glib, but there’s an edge to it. Unfortunately, since the devil-may-care attitude of Tony Stark was largely what made the first film fun, if he’s grouchy and out-of-sorts, it kind of throws everything else off as well. If you can’t count on Tony Stark to be a smart-ass and bed a supermodel while saving the world, who can you count on?
As we soon find out, there is a reason for his inability to fully embrace the lightheartedness that made him so endearing in the first movie: he’s hiding a fatal secret. There’s some great stuff here. In fits and spurts Downey gives us glimpses of a man who can conquer anything except his own mortality. This would be enough character meat for any movie, but this one largely ignores Stark’s quest for a cure in favor of looking at what imminent defeat does to the ego of a man like Tony Stark. Apparently, it makes him promote a valiant Gwyneth Paltrow to CEO of Stark Industries, hire a woman half his age as a personal assistant because, well, she’s kind of there, and fly to Monaco, where he humiliates competitor Justin Hammer (a mincing Sam Rockwell, who I hope to God intended to come off as a pale, awkward imitation of Downey’s Stark, because otherwise he was just playing a dick) and races, unannounced, in the Grand Prix, where the disgruntled Vanko sneaks onto the track and tries to turn him into flanksteak with laserwhips. My favorite action sequence by far in this flick is Happy Hogan (Favreau), Stark’s driver, squaring off against the exoskeletoned Vanko in
Long story short, Hammer, like the tool that he is, goes into business with Vanko as Stark spirals out of control and pushes away everyone who actually cares about him. This prompts two interventions. The first is the aforementioned scene that puts Rhodey in the War Machine armor – and makes the danger of drunk driving seem like the safety of sleeping on a bed made of Peeps. Just imagine a drunk driver whose car can fly and shoot lasers and can only be opened from the inside. Now imagine he’s driving down a block where a group of high school kids are waiting on the corner for their bus, and you’re almost to the level of gut-churnity the first half of this scene evokes. Then comes the second half, where it devolves into ILM-abetted slapstick. It’s not Peter Darker sleaze-dancing his way down the streets of Manhattan, but it’s close.
The second, and understandably more effective intervention is delivered at the hands of Sam Jackson’s Nick Fury. I love Sam in this role. But I do kind of wish that between Theroux and Favreau, somebody would have pointed out that just because Downey is in the film, that doesn’t mean all the other male characters have to match his lackadaisically glib attitude and delivery (“Sir,I’m going to have to ask you to get out of the donut,” is a funny line, but so out of character for Fury as to be distracting). Their meeting leads to a number of revelations, some interesting and some unnecessary. I have no idea why Black Widow is in this movie, other than that more is more thing – and the fact that it provided the filmmakers the opportunity to squeeze Johanssen’s “more” into “less.” From a story perspective, she’s slutterly extraneous.
The interesting side of these revelations, however, leads to one of those weird structural things I mentioned earlier. The first movie found Iron Man suit’s power failing during the climactic battle, which added danger and suspense to the physical side of the confrontation. Here, he becomes more powerful than ever in advance of the climax. It’s sort of OK given that he’s facing off against superior numbers, so he’s still at a disadvantage, but you never want your hero to have a leg up on the bad guys going into the fight. He’s supposed to be on the ropes, and then find the thing that revitalizes him, so he can triumph over impossible odds. Even the solution to his fatal problem happens in two parts, diminishing the dramatic impact of both. By the time he finds the permanent solution, he’s conveniently already been given a temporary one. At that point, his success and survival is never in doubt, utterly sapping whatever drama there could have been from those scenes. In the movie as a whole, Stark’s emotional and physical low-points come at two different times as well, making the resolution of each less cathartic, and, ultimately, making the entire enterprise nowhere near as exciting as it should have been. Sorry as I am to say it, in places this sucker drags like Pete Bogen did junior year right after he found out the stuff his dad was growing in the basement under the fluorescent light wasn’t rosemary. For cryin’ out loud, the movie has the audience watching C-Span for five minutes 3 scenes in.
While there are a number of positives, mostly in the performance category, this movie really could have used a couple more passes on the script to trim away some of the fat and make the remaining meat a bit more flavorful. In the end, it’s much closer to what the first film would have been sans Robert Downey, Jr. – a pretty standard summer action flick. Bummer.
Two-and-a-half Batrocs.
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