At the end of Iron Man, Tony Stark (Robert Downey, Jr.) revealed his identity to the world, sparing subsequent films from those shopworn superhero alter-ego issues but triggering new problems with the U.S. government, particularly a senate committee headed by Senator Stern (Garry Shandling), who doesn’t trust any individual to “privatize world peace.”
Now, while fending off the bureaucrats and military brass who want to seize his Iron Man suit and turn it over to rival weapons manufacturer Justin Hammer (Sam Rockwell), Stark must contend with a vengeful Russian physicist named Ivan Vanko (Mickey Rourke), even as he suffers poisoning from the very power source that sustains his technology and, by extension, his life.
Iron Man 2  
Directed by Jon Favreau. |
Vanko has constructed his own variation on the miniature arc reactor that powers the Iron Man suit, and when he nearly murders Stark at the Monaco Grand Prix, it seems to demonstrate that Sen. Stern is right to doubt the capacity of Iron Man to remain both unique and unassailable.
But Stark has friends, too, and not exclusively in former personal assistant Pepper Potts (Gwyneth Paltrow) and bodyguard-cum-chauffeur Happy Hogan (played by director Jon Favreau).
Nick Fury (Samuel L. Jackson) is back with a meatier role than his previous Marvel movie cameos, advising and chastening Stark while dropping hints about the Avengers Initiative (we even get our first look at some choice pieces of hardware linked to other, familiar superheroes, though you’ll have to stick around until after the closing credits for one of them). And Scarlett Johansson joins the cast as Natalie Rushman, Stark’s new assistant, who packs some surprises of her own.
From the get-go, Iron Man has situated itself as the antithesis of Batman’s brooding 21st-century incarnations. It’s light-hearted enough that when Col. Rhodes (Don Cheadle, aptly replacing the thankfully departed Terrance Howard) and an inebriated Iron Man have a suited-up throw-down that destroys half of Stark’s mansion, it doesn’t leave any lingering hard feelings.
The darkness of Rourke’s Vanko character – a delectable antagonist, combining elements of Heath Ledger’s Joker and Hannibal Lecter – is offset by what can only be described as the plucky rancor of Justin Hammer, a character which likely would have fallen flat in any other hands than Rockwell’s. As it is, the most enjoyable scenes in the movie dwell on the interplay between these two opposite but like-minded villains.
The good guys are much less interesting. Scenes between Stark and Pepper are so full of banter they feel like outtakes from Lucky Number Slevin, and Downey, Jr. mumbles through enough of them that it’s easy to miss the exposition and plot advancement intermittently woven in.
Natalie Rushman is shoe-horned into the first act simply so that she can have one of those dual identities the writers seemed to think would be a cliché and a waste of time on Stark. The complicated and unsatisfying series of promotions, role changes, and shifting allegiances that swirl around her throughout the first hour invite comparison to the inanity of the Pirates of the Caribbean sequels.
And Stark’s palladium poisoning, while good for suspense, leads to a silly and overlong plot device involving the synthesis of a new element comparable only to The Dark Knight’s ridiculous “visual sonar” in terms of needless effects work with no real narrative justification or emotional payoff.
But if the worst that can be said about a movie is that it tries to do a bit too much at once (and the failure here is nothing beside the colossal muddle of Spider-Man 3) and waxes self-indulgent in the visual effects department, certainly it has gotten a lot of things right.
Prime among them is the fact that Tony Stark remains a superhero unlike any other, flawed to his core yet always ready to do the right thing when push comes to shove.
Maybe Marvel felt threatened by the talent on display in The Dark Knight; whatever the reason, in Iron Man 2 they put together an incredibly solid cast for a comic-book adaptation.
That and the trickle of hints at a consistent, contiguous Marvel universe in which multiple superheroes coexist just goes to show that the company is taking its fledgling film-making very seriously, as further evidenced by the involvement of Anthony Hopkins and Natalie Portman in the Kenneth Branagh-directed Thor, slated for release next summer, precisely one year after the opening of Iron Man 2.