Not Comics: Several Multiloquent, Very Late Notes On That Iron Man 2 Flick

* first thing: did you have any friends that watched the first Iron Man movie that aren't a) naturally besotted with Robert Downey, Jr., or b) aren't the kind of people that habitually go to blockbuster movies? I have about a dozen pals that fit that description, and they all hated Iron Man.

* the reason I mention that is that I think there are things to remember about the first Iron Man movie in relation to this one. The first movie's strengths were a perfectly primed-to-hit Robert Downey, Jr., that it was first out of the gate in 2008 after 2007's summer of tired-ass third sequels, and that it's much easier to do respectable-looking CGI with armor rather than (green) skin. Most of the other positives in the film were secondary to one or more of those factors, or supported one of those strengths.

* Iron Man 2, in contrast, leans on the strengths of the first movie rather than plays to those strengths or builds on them. It does not give a still well-liked Downey enough material to work with or play against. By far Downey's best co-star in terms of the actor bouncing a performance off of him was John Slattery's newsreel image, which is sort of weird. Iron Man 2 does not add significantly or creatively to the sense of new that the first one brought audiences, right down to what I would term an ill-advised re-use of some of the same sets. The CGI material was still only okay, and you still lose the faces.

* more than anything else, Iron Man 2 is a movie with a discernible lack of dramatic tension. I didn't take the blood poisoning threat to Tony Stark's life seriously, and the way it's temporarily ameliorated with injections at the donut shop by Nurse Romanov indicates maybe I wasn't supposed to. We aren't given access to or insight into the stable, base behavior against which we can then measure the personal decline that alarms Tony Stark's friends. The producers finally found the actor -- Samuel L. Jackson -- with whom Robert Downey Jr. seems to have almost no chemistry whatsoever. One villain, Justin Hammer, we're told from scene one not to take seriously. A second, Whiplash, seems to offer as a significant part of his character a sense that he's a tragic figure who wants to spit in the eye of God. This is fine as far as character-building goes, but as a result Whiplash come across much less seriously as an ultimate threat. When Whiplash shows up to fight Iron Man and War Machine in the film's action climax, it's like he's keeping an appointment to get his ass kicked, not arriving at the worst possible time and making everybody crap their pants. He kills more Hammer employees in the course of the film than seriously threatens Stark ones -- in fact, by taking off for the Expo to receive his beating, Whiplash avoids an encounter with two Stark allies in which he would have been an overwhelming, terrifying threat and had a much better chance to cause deep hurt and pain to Stark. I never became scared for any of the people in danger at the Stark Expo, and besides, they felt like extras, not civilians. There isn't any reason to be scared for/of the robots, because they're robots, not something like army men stuck in armor that won't obey them. They're not even super-powerful robots.

* I thought the Nick Fury scenes were uniformly awful. I like Samuel Jackson generally. I'm a Marvel geek, too. I know what the helicarrier is and what LMDs are. I still found these scenes to be dull as dirt. There's a basic dramatic scene failure going on with Fury: there is no underlying drama to the way he enters Tony Stark's space. Fury just sort of walks in to talk to Tony Stark and then walks away. There's more fundamental drama to my family coming over for a holiday meal than there is with the Most Dangerous Man In The World strolling into Tony Stark's life at this time of horrific pain and vulnerability. It always felt like he sauntering in from off-camera than that he was ever approaching another human being, a formidable one, in real space. The one bit of possible drama between the characters -- Fury's directive that Stark must stay at home and work on the Howard Stark locker -- is side-stepped and has absolutely no consequences in terms of the relationship between the two men. Dullsville.

* Nick Fury's general suckiness extends to the Black Widow. If there's a less interesting way to find out a close employee is a spy than to have her walk up and sit next to a guy in a diner booth on what felt like an empty set rather than anywhere in the real world, it's difficult to concoct that scenario.

* I thought the movie squandered a lot of easy opportunities to build action or craft meaning out of specific moments. For instance, Justin Hammer's final takedown is by Pepper Potts -- couldn't there be one tiny scene between Potts and Hammer early on that set up this comeuppance? Or did I miss it? There's another wasted trio of scenes later on, where Happy Hogan and The Black Widow go to the car, have a drive together and then arrive at a business facility and bicker about who is going into the building first. I couldn't possibly fathom who cares about these characters having time together, but even then, the scenes could have been used to more clearly build to the comic payoff of Happy Hogan taking out one guy while Black Widow takes out 50. (Also, to nerd-pick a bit, the fight between Hogan and the guard should have been boxing versus MMA-style fighting to call back to Hogan's distaste for the latter earlier in the movie. Maybe it was; it wasn't clear. It could have been clear.) Black Widow could have let Happy charge ahead and then calmly walked in behind him to devastate the other team -- that would have married that scene to how she plays Tony Stark and thus provided a nice spin on the Black Widow character: she lets guys be headstrong dumbasses and then calmly and confidently goes about her business. Instead we get Happy and Natasha banter. Nitpicking a movie like this is horrible, because it's back-seat driving and these people know way more about movies than I do, obviously. It's just that in scenes like that one and many others I never got put on the edge of my seat, not even close, and I do that really easily with popcorn movies. The whole enterprise felt slack.

* that said, there are plenty of crowd-pleasing things. The leads and co-stars are all super-pleasant, all interesting on some level to watch do their business. That scene of Robert Downey Jr. by himself, reacting to these films of his father while at the same time trying to get some work done, that's some fun acting. Rhodey 2.0 is an upgrade. Fewer people are likely to be enraged by elements of Don Cheadle's performance the way they seemed to be at parts of Terrence Howard's. Cheadle's mirroring of Downey's verbal patter is a smart way of showing why he and Tony Stark are friends: they don't really compete, and Rhodey keeps up. The actors playing the two major bad guys know how to play off of Downey's performance in a way that generates friction that maybe wasn't there in the script. It's believable they hate Tony Stark on a fundamental level. The female co-stars are appealing and while I believe the movie fails the Bechdel test they're both at least formidable characters on some level. I liked the way the fight scenes unfold like video game problem-solving. The first fight between Whiplash and Iron Man had a crazy, something-weird-could-happen feel to it that is the great gift of the better superhero movies. There's stuff to see and enjoy.

* my favorite funny-only-to-me thing was how quickly Rhodey, when confronted with drunk, suited-up Tony, decides that he better put on a suit, too. I bet he did that a lot coming over to Tony Stark's house between movies and people like Pepper Potts had to spend a lot of time blocking the door and talking him down. Like I can see Rhodey volunteering to pick up the Chinese food they all ordered and two minutes later they find him suiting up so he can fly over and get it and they have to yell at him to take a car. Rhodey really wanted that suit.

* in the end, I don't think a ton of people are going to hate the movie, but I think the third one won't have the same guaranteed US box office this one did, the other Marvel films are going to be hard-pressed to find the same situational advantages the first film in this series had, and I think the evaluation of this film may trend downward when it begins to cycle on DVD and other secondary media. I liked the film okay. It passed the time on a late summer afternoon and I didn't look at my watch.


 
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