DAA DAAAA DADADA, DUDDLE DUDDLE LUDDA LA DA DA DAAA~
(That, um, that was me humming/singing "Iron Man." In text.)
So, so far for 2010, there are only two movies I was really excited about. This is one of them. (The other is Sands of Time, which I know probably won't be anything special given video game movies' track record, but dangit I loved that game and I need to see how the silver-screen version compares. Ahem. Anyway. Moving on.)
I'll come out and say it straight away: In my opinion, Iron Man 2 is not as good as the first film.
However, it's still certainly not bad. I've seen worse sequels, and IM2 is entertaining in its own right--worth seeing once, doubly so if you were a fan of the first film, but it still lacks a lot of the magic of its predecessor. Iron Man himself has, in spite of my love of comics, never really been a character I knew much about (and what knowledge I do have of him mostly comes from research I did prior to the first film), so that also makes this movie series in particular more "new" to me, which is exciting.
A large part of the film is driven by an underlying subplot--Tony is dying. It turns out he never really considered the consequences of having an arc reactor in his body long-term, and the palladium batteries it runs on are poisoning him due to constant exposure. He's been researching possibilities for an alternate power source, but seems to keep hitting dead ends, and is coping with the possibility that he could die very soon. Meanwhile, his company's still in a bit of a dive, the public is divided as to whether Iron Man is awesome or dangerous, and the US Government is demanding Tony hand over the suit for military application rather than private use. Meanwhile, far off in Siberia, a man with some interesting connections to the Stark family is watching Tony's fame grow...and he's not happy. Not at all.
For this little overview, I'd actually like to start with the negatives, then move on to the positives so we can hit this on a high note. Ready, annnd go.
My biggest complaint here, the thing I had the most trouble with and which I've seen pointed out in several other reviews, is the content of the movie that specifically pertains to Avengers rather than Iron Man. (For those not in the know, The Avengers are Marvel Comics' equivalent of DC's Justice League, and Iron Man happens to be a member. If you're not familiar with the Justice League, they're kind of like the Super Friends.) Once Marvel got its' own movie studio, it got excited at the possibility of creating a "Marvel Movieverse," using film as another medium to recreate all their classic characters, and a big idea contained within this was to eventually release an Avengers movie. I feel pretty "eh" regarding it myself, the Avengers were never something I really got into, and I think a movie with that many main characters would just end up being too convoluted. And, unfortunately, the fact that Marvel is actively building towards this now means that we can expect there to be specifically Avengers-related subplots in all the movies it generates up to that point. The Avengers material in IM2 is...annoying. The scenes dealing with it are few, but jarring and feel uncomfortably like the filmic equivalent of a pop-up ad. Virtually all the movie's fanservice in this installment relates to it as well, and it too is blunt and out-of-place enough to verge on annoying (at one point, Captain America's shield shows up, and the actors stop just short of waving it in front of the camera going "HEY FANBOYS LOOK").
Samuel L. Jackson's role as Nick Fury has also been upgraded from an after-credits cameo to a full-fledged minor character, with varying success. His stuff involving his own agency, SHIELD (essentially a superhero-watchdog group) mostly works, as far as having another group that's watching Tony's activities with interest. The cap on all this is an entirely lackluster (and yes, once more, Avengers-related) after-credits easter egg. I was expecting more Iron Man-related goodness, but instead it's just the first teaser for Marvel's next project, and it's not even a particularly effective teaser--it's a long buildup, then a shot of Mjolnir (Thor's battle hammer). That's it. My main problem with all this Avengers product-placement is I think it limits the accessability. For many people, the movies now being put out are their first experience with these characters, while a manuever like this seems to have had only the preexisting fanbase in mind. Perhaps I'm wrong and they'll take an interesting turn with it, we'll see, but for the most part it currently felt like a distraction.
Second, let's talk about a couple bits of plot. For the most part, IM2, like its predecessor, has relatively few plot holes, at least within its own containment. (As far as links to the previous film go, there is an out-standing one--whatever happened to the Ten Rings terrorist group that was so prevalent in the first film? I didn't think that one excursion to the desert meant Tony had gotten all of them!) There are, however, a couple cases of what could be either slightly rushed writing or things that were cut for time. Most of note is the resolving of the whole "oh no, Tony's dying" subplot that had overshadowed most of the movie. While the solution in of itself is neat, and how he discovers it is neat, it arrives all at once as an "a-ha" moment that...he figures out all too quickly. I know Tony Stark is supposed to be a genius, and for the most part I buy it, but the speed at which he suddenly arrived to his solution failed to suspend my disbelief for that scene and felt like a quick-fix. There's also (very slight spoiler alert) a very, very brief romantic suplot with Tony and Pepper (seriously, we're talking all of three minutes devoted to it) that just feels arbitrarily shoehorned in and kind of wrecks the banter-tastic relationship they had for the last 1-and-three-quarters movies.
Finally, of the large negative categories, some nitpicks with the characters. Let's start with the villains. Like the previous film, there are two, a major one and a minor one. The primary one, played by Mickey Rourke, is Ivan Vanko, a Russian physicist and mechanical genius rivaling Tony. For the most part, his performance and characterization are decent-to-pretty-good (something I'll get into a bit more later), but there was one aspect of him that I just refused to buy--in addition to being good at building robots, suits, and weaponry, he's apparently a very accomplished hacker. I think I didn't accept it mainly because, even though he utilizes it at several points through the film, it's an aspect of him introduced very suddenly and without much previous setup. You could argue that it's an offshoot of his being able to program robots, but then I would have liked to see that first so the whole "oh, he's also a hacker" didn't come as an eyebrow-quirking surprise.
Justin Hammer, the secondary/minor villain (the CEO of a rival weapons manufacturer to Stark Industries), also makes some moronically bad choices through the course of the film (which I'd prefer not to spoil)--how'd this guy get to run a company? He also has very little in the way of motivation aside from just sort of generally being a prick. Again, like the whole Vanko/Robots/Hacking thing, you could argue that he's a sort of naive person who doesn't know what he's getting into (not a lot of actual villainy is perpetrated by him), but then I think we should have seen more of that side of him, make him seem more innocent. Though it's a nitpick, I also prefer Vanko's initial design (that you've seen in previews--the simple metal framework) to his "final battle" design--that one seems uninspired, as more or less just another guy in a big metal suit.
I was also mostly unimpressed by Scarlett Johannson's role as Black Widow, a Marvel-universe secret agent. For all her tough-gal posturing (and decent fight sequence), she seemed relegated to a mostly cheesecake role. Shame.
As a last, final nitpick (truly something minor, but I must address it!) before moving on to the praise...where's the Iron Man song?! That song was an aural high point for the first film, and was even used in some of the trailers for this one, but not even a bar of it was present for this outing. Laaaaame.
And now, the good.
We'll start with characters again. One of my main complaints about the first movie is that while Obadiah Stane (Jeff Bridges) made a threatening and relatively competant villain, he didn't make a particularly interesting one, having little motivation other than simple greed. While Ivan Vanko's motivations still don't seem to be given quite enough writing attention, he at least has more in the way of them, something I greatly appreciated and something that made him feel much more like a character rather than just someone propped up for the hero to fight. Something in me also liked that he was after Tony specifically. While he was an obstacle in Obadiah's larger quest for power, Vanko isn't after that, at least not as a primary concern. First and foremost, he just wants Tony Stark to die, and that to me is more threatening.
In addition, Don Cheadle replacing the prior actor as Colonel Rhodes was a remarkably good choice. Rhodes, too, was a bit of a bland character in the first film--Cheadle's Rhodes is a much more likeable character and I found myself far more interested in him than I had been. He also feels distinctly more like the military figure he's supposed to be, and you get a much more believable sense of he and Tony actually being friends, rather than people that just sort of tolerate each other.
As for the movie that encases the characters, it's--well, fun. There's a lot of big, actiony scenes, and most of them are well-done, well-shot, and properly engaging. There's lots of nifty science-fiction technology to show off (highlights: a few new Iron Man and Iron-Man-derived suits, with some new equipment to boot, as well as Vanko's makeshift harness from the first fight scene), plenty of snappy one-liners from that lovable jerk Tony, and apart from my complaints with its resolution the "Tony's slowly dying" subplot was actually pretty-well handled with regards to his character.
As another point to the writing, it seemed slightly self-aware in some ways I liked--firstly, a lot of people have pointed out Tony as a hypocrite from the first movie, in that he declared Stark Industries would not be making weapons anymore, then goes and makes what is in many ways a big fancy wearable weapon. Guess what another large plot catalyst involves? The United States military pointing out exactly that. Props for listening to people, writers. Tony also showcases a new weapon during the final fight that takes out the remaining baddies rather handily. While it was cool, I found myself asking "wait, why didn't he just do that at the start of the fight?"--and then Rhodes asked him the same thing. (Even better? Tony then explains why. And it makes sense.) It's this sort of thing that leads me to want to believe some of the plot oversights and shortcuts were just things that were cut for time.
So, once again I find myself in the slightly awkward position of having said more negative than positive about a movie I overall liked. I hope it doesn't seem like a cop-out, then, that I still feel mostly positive about it. Iron Man 2, due to lots of small issues and larger looming issue of the misaimed focus on building towards an Avengers movie, can't reclaim everything that made Iron Man a supremely enjoyable superhero flick, and just generally isn't quite as good. But that doesn't stop it from still being a worthy opening action film to herald the summer movie season, and a decent sequel as sequels are wont to go. I give Iron Man 2 Two and two-thirds out of four crickets.
Holden Out.
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