Iron Man 2 Review

The Summer is here!!! Whoo!!! It’s blockbuster season and first out of the blocks is Iron Man 2. Tony Stark is BACK! Wealthy, adored, witty, pithy, charming, disarming and that’s before he suits up and kicks ass and…

Oh who am I kidding, I didn’t like it.

It’s six months since Tony Stark came out as Iron Man and, in his own words, he has “privatised world peace.” The element powering his heart and keeping him alive is also slowly poisoning him and he has been unable to find a replacement power source. The U.S. Senate is trying to get him to hand over the Iron Man weapon but he is successfully deflecting them, mainly, it would seem, on charm and sarcasm alone. Returning from the original are faithful secretary and love interest Pepper Potts (Gwyneth Paltrow) and his long suffering army buddy Rhodes (Don Cheadle replacing Terence Howard) . Newcomers are Ivan Vanko a.k.a. Whiplash (Mickey Rourke) who is hell bent on Stark’s/Iron Man’s demise due to a personal vendetta, Natalie Rushman a.k.a. Natasha Romanoff a.k.a. Black Widow (Scarlett Johansson) a SHIELD operative under cover as a Stark Industries employee and the thankfully singularly named Justin Hammer (Sam Rockwell) a rival arms dealer and wannabe Tony Stark who takes Whiplash under his wing to create an army of Iron Men to render the original obsolete and ruin Stark’s legacy.

As you can see there is a lot going on in Iron Man 2. Which makes it even more strange how, after about half an hour, the film keels over and dies. For the first 15 minutes or so it’s business as usual. Fast talking Stark talks fast, acts cool, flirts with Pepper Potts yada yada yada. At this point comes the film’s best sequence by a mile where Stark goes to the Monaco Grand Prix and ends up in the race. Here, Whiplash makes his entrance, his electric whips cutting through metal with ease, sending race cars flying and devastating Stark in front of the world. It’s a really fun sequence, it feels like something different, it’s well directed by returning director Jon Favreau and there are several cool little moments, my favourite being Mickey Rourke, his electric whips crackling, walking the wrong way up the middle of the track as race cars zoom past him. When Stark turns into Iron Man the expectation is an epic battle and here the sequence falls short; the build up is way better than the payoff but, that aside, the film felt for a moment that it might become a fun, Summer blockbuster. And then it flatlines. Completely. The problem is that Iron Man 2 is completely aimless, totally directionless. It has nothing driving it and nowhere to go. It basically spends the next hour waiting for the finale. Which, you know, isn’t brilliant really. This is best described by what happens to Rourke’s character. Having unleashed a fun villain and a credible threat to Iron Man, what happens? He spends the next hour in a warehouse building stuff; welding, typing on his computer, waiting to be released again for the finale. Imagine if, in The Dark Knight, when The Joker was caught and captured he hadn’t escaped and had sat in jail waiting to be let out for the finale. It’s the same thing. The film doesn’t know what to do with him because it doesn’t know what it’s doing or where it’s going.

The middle hour is completely flat. Characters yabber at each other about nothing and the whole film is resting on Robert Downey Junior’s charisma. There is actually very little Iron Man in the film and while one could argue that Tony Stark is more interesting than Bruce Wayne, Bruce Banner or Peter Parker, ultimately we are there to see their superhero alter egos, not their normal personas. One or two individual moments work reasonably well, Stark getting drunk at his birthday for example because he believes he won’t live to see another. But these moments are exactly that; moments. Individually they are insufficient and collectively they don’t add up to anything. The issue of Stark being slowly poisoned seems to be the driving force for the film but the way it resolves is massively anti-climactic, way too easy and totally lacking in drama. On top of that, it never really impacts on the story. Stark as Iron Man is always able to fight and fly and do whatever he has to so we never really feel the threat of the poison. Add to that the fact that the main villain spends his time building robots and the other villain is pretending not to be a villain and you have a film completely devoid of threat, tension and interest. There was talk of the script being rushed through because of the writer’s strike and the film basically being made up as they went along and that would go a long way to explaining the problems with Iron Man 2. By the time the finale comes it’s too little too late. There are a couple of nice action moments but it ultimately comes down to CGI metal men clanging each other across the head and, well, I guess that just doesn’t do it for me. There is a wonderful line in The Dark Knight when the Joker asks Batman (and this is paraphrasing) if he really thought he would let the battle for Gotham’s soul come down to a fist fight between them. It’s a terrific idea and it’s something these superhero films could try and incorporate into their stories. Your hero is made of metal so your villain also has to be made of metal, and be bigger presumably, but where can you really go with that? Have all the action and special effects you want but be clever and do something different with your story and its finale.

I’m not a comic book fan and I never read Iron Man so most of the references and in jokes will be lost on me. I’m sure the geeks will get off on things I didn’t spot, although I did get one. And I was very proud! Much of what’s in Iron Man 2 of course is also set up for Marvel’s Avengers movie coming in 2012. There are 2 scenes with Samuel L Jackson as Nick Fury, both of which are redundant in this film, but which serve to remind us of the broader universe Iron Man is operating in. Also, Scarlett Johansson gets a fight scene of her own that’s quite good fun and, just for a moment, watching her in her figure hugging leather outfit, I could empathise with straight guys and lesbians; she really is hot. But none of this helps Iron Man 2 which, tries to be bigger and better than its predecessor and for a moment succeeds, but in the end settles for being at best more of the same and at worst not as good.

4.5/10