Iron Man 2 Review

Everybody has bad days. Everybody’s had one of those days where every conceivable thing that can go wrong does, where all the traffic lights turn red just when you get to them, where a little drizzle becomes a torrential downpour as soon as you step outside, where every single bird in the sky drops a big one right on your new coat, where some random guy punches you in the face just because and where you have to wonder what it is about you that makes everything go so consistently wrong. Even Tony Stark has days like that. He has days where new supervillains come to town to destroy his legacy, where the government strives to take his work and livelihood away, where his rival one-ups him, where his friends turn against him and where the very thing that makes him powerful is slowly killing him. Iron Man 2 is an exercise in Murphy’s Law and that’s both to its benefit and its detriment. It aptly creates a scenario where Iron Man is overwhelmed by too many things, too many villains and too many challenges rushing at him all at once; but, unfortunately, it’s also very good at making the audience share his pain.

Superhero sequels are interesting anomalies, flying in the face of that old truism that sequels can never surpass their originals. The simple fact is that most superhero movie franchises exhibit their best work in their second installments and not their firsts. The reason is that those same firsts need to detail the origin of their hero and they often regard this task as a burden to be rushed through as quickly as possible. The sequels, relieved of this burden, are able to explore their characters and their world with a great deal more liberty. The Dark Knight and Spider-Man 2 stand as strong evidence of this. But the first Iron Man never regarded its origin sequence as a burden. Actually, it embraced it, devoted itself entirely to telling the story of how a billionaire playboy becomes a modern day knight in shining armor. As a result, its sequel isn’t so much liberated, as lost. It bypasses Spider-Man 2 and heads straight into Spider-Man 3, overstuffing itself with two main villains, three superheroes, Nick Fury’s Avengers Initiative, secret family histories, lost dreams of utopian ideals and an army of killer robots. Still, where Spider-Man 3 was essentially three separate movies cut up and spliced together in an ungainly, mishmashed mockery of life, Iron Man 2 is just a tad unfocused.

The story begins – at least thematically – where the first one left off. After the incidents with Iron Monger and the Ten Rings, Tony Stark has become quite paranoid about sharing his technology and refuses to hand his Iron Man suit over to the government. They have little grounds for their claims, of course, as Tony proves that the rest of the world is ten years away from replicating his work. But then a crazy, vengeful Russian guy – Whiplash/Crimson Dynamo (because he’s a little bit of both) – makes his own suit and stages a public attack, in one day decimating all of Tony’s political defenses.

Does it matter that there’s a huge gulf between a harness with a couple of taser cables attached and a full suit of nearly indestructible battle armor with missiles, lasers and rocket boots? Of course it doesn’t. We’re talking about politicians. Reality means nothing to them.

The pressure mounts from all sides, as the military demand answers and Whiplash allies himself with Justin Hammer, a rival arms manufacturer. This, combined with the discovery that Tony’s artificial heart-piece is slowly poisoning him, creates a severe strain in his personal relationships and leads his best friend, James Rhodes, to question if Tony Stark is the right man to wear the armor.

And then there’s that new secretary. Yeah, there’s definitely something up with her.

Okay, so the story is a bit of a conceptual smorgasbord. But what elevates it over Spider-Man 3 is that the different plot threads aren’t stand-alone; they intermingle, motivate and react to each other. Whiplash obviously leads to increased tension in the political story, but his motives also connect him to a subplot involving Tony’s issues with his father, wherein the solution to his poison suit problem is found. Also, Whiplash’s arrival, the involvement of Justin Hammer and the personal stress caused by the poison suit arc all contribute pieces of the puzzle that ultimately reveals War Machine. None of the plots are independent, they all need each other.

But while they do mesh, they never really gel; and several of them have small, but noticeable flaws. The poison suit remedy leaves a lot to be desired. Whiplash’s grievance with Tony is left fairly unexamined and Rhodey’s immediate penchant for controlling his armor is a tad inexplicable. It’s not that there are any plot holes per se – everything really does make sense with a bit of thought – it’s just a few things get lost in the shuffle and certain events can be a bit jarring at first sight. Nothing is particularly underdeveloped, but a few things are left woefully unexplored.

Still, it’d be very hard to remove any element without massive rewrites. Nothing is really ancillary, just not smoothly incorporated. The father stuff and Black Widow are probably the easiest targets for omission, but the former does offer some inferential rationales for Tony’s attitude in both films and the latter is important to the series narrative. Remember that the Iron Man movies – along with Incredible Hulk, Thor and Captain America – are essentially elaborate lead-ins to the crossover Avengers film; and SHIELD, Nick Fury and now apparently Black Widow are a part of that. I do have to wonder how much of a role Black Widow will play in this franchise, though. Is she just an extraneous extra for this one movie or will she, like Nick Fury, prove a touch more omnipresent? They could stand to add a female Avenger and Black Widow is as suitable a candidate as any other Marvel heroine, I suppose, but she isn’t quite as iconic as any of her would-be teammates. If she is part of the team, though, Scarlett Johansson is going to need to step up her performance a bit. Regardless, she does well enough here to help move the Avengers connection from a tease to a legitimate part of the narrative. But speaking of teases, did you see the scene after the credits? 

Also speaking of teases, what happened to the Mandarin allusions? The first movie focused heavily on a multi-ethnic terrorist groups called the Ten Rings — a reference to Mandarin’s rings of power — and the third movie is already confirmed to be using him as a villain. But the second movie does nothing to build to that. No Ten Rings. No Valley of Spirits. Not even a fleeting mention of China. Nothing. It’s not irredeemable; Iron Man 3 will likely find ways of retroactively attributing certain things to Mandarin’s influence. There’s a shady guy with Whiplash at the beginning, for example, who will almost certainly be revealed as Ten Rings. So, that’s something, but not much.

It’s not that big a deal, I guess, because Iron Man 2 already has quite a lot of story to worry about. And while the different plot threads don’t flow smoothly in parallel so much as clump together in a big tangled knot, there is a holistic value in that knot, a sort of beauty in chaos. Iron Man 2 is fundamentally about the self-destruction of Tony Stark and all of these different plots contribute different pressures that build on each other until eventually he breaks down and is left to sulk alone in a giant donut. Haven’t we all been there?

Long time comic fans might recognize some passing resemblance to the alcoholism story that nearly destroyed Tony in the eighties; but in the movie, his vice isn’t the sauce, it’s the suit. Tony Stark always had a unique relationship with his superhero persona because the device that powers the suit is also keeping deeply embedded shrapnel from traveling into his heart. But now it’s also poisoning him. This is an interesting personal conflict for a superhero movie. Rather than set Tony Stark and Iron Man against each other, this movie introduces an element unique to their coexistence that threatens both of them; it blurs the distinction between them because this is the one component they both need to function. The man and the suit are distinct, but they share the same heart, the same weakness.

This poses a simple question: who is Iron Man? Is he just some guy in a fancy metal suit? Is he the armor or the man inside the armor? Or is it more complicated than that? Well, if you remember, the first movie ended with a press conference where Tony Stark proudly and publicly declared to everyone that he was Iron Man, thus merging his two personas and sidestepping that secret identity barrier that creates the dichotomous struggles of other superheroes. And if you don’t remember, this movie is kind enough to replay the audio from that press conference during its opening because this question of who Tony Stark is in relation to Iron Man underscores much of the story. This is basically a superhero identity crisis narrative, but it veers from the usual questions of how to reconcile a higher calling with getting a date for Friday night in favor of a somewhat more interesting examination of where the man ends and the superman begins.

Even the other superpeople are caught up in Iron Man’s battle to reaffirm his fragmented identity, each of them personifying some part of it. Whiplash is the summation of the shadows in Tony’s past, the embodiment of his self-doubt and loathing. Justin Hammer is all of the insecurity and awkwardness that Tony masks with his obviously false bravado; he shares Tony’s erratic personality, but not the façade of confidence that makes it so infectious. His failed attempts to create knock-off armors also mirror Tony’s inability to perfect his original. War Machine is Iron Man without the personal demons – or poisonous chestpiece – to weigh him down. And Black Widow, Nick Fury and the Avengers Initiative are the higher calling that encourage Iron Man’s recovery and allow him to stand side-by-side with his better half to defeat the swarms of killer robots of… let’s say… stage fright?

I don’t know. That’s all a bit over-analytical, though the basis for it is definitely there. But Iron Man 2 isn’t terribly ponderous when it comes to these issues. Like the first one, it’s intended as lighthearted fun with just enough dramatic weight to keep it balanced. It doesn’t do as good a job of maintaining that balance this time – occasionally the humor does get a tad intrusive now – but it’s still highly effective, due in no small part to the cast. Mickey Rourke’s scary/weird Whiplash instills a D-list supervillain with a lot of gravitas. Sam Rockwell gives us a goofy Justin Hammer who seems incapable of running his company, yet manages to stay rich anyway with the generous assistance of the US government (how very modern). And, of course, Robert Downey Jr. is Iron Man in the way that Christopher Reeve was Superman; he brings such a natural presence and immediate personality to his role  and establishes an easy chemistry with nearly all of his co-stars that he transforms what could have been a slog on the level of Revenge of the Fallen into a solid bit of entertainment.

And it’s nice to see a superhero franchise deal with these issues of identity and personal conflict without all those tedious speeches about destiny and being a symbol (seriously, why is Smallville still on the air?). The plot is convoluted, some might find the ending a bit anticlimactic, the killer robots could have been called Ultimos (I’m just sayin’) and trying to follow any individual storyline will lead one into a realm where darkness and madness intertwine – this is undeniably true – but Iron Man 2 is closer to Batman Returns than Spider-Man 3. It has more than it needs, but not too much. It isn’t perfect – it’s not even as good as the original – but Iron Man 2 is still an interesting and exciting exploration of what happens when a superhero has one of those days.

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