The review
Marvel greenlit Iron Man 2 days after the first one opened, and it plays like a kid let loose in a bigger toy box: more suits, more villains, more spies, and a pace that wanders in bits and places. Waifu and I watched it the night after Iron Man, film 2 of the road to Doomsday.
Here's what the movie is doing, and it took me a rewatch to see it. Iron Man closed Tony's arc almost too well: a playboy billionaire has a date with death, figures out life, turns a new leaf. So what do you do for a sequel? If you want a deeper, more complex journey, you need a personal problem, and the writers went with: the thing that's saving him is also killing him. It's a narration tool. Now Tony (Robert Downey Jr.) is the rowdy daredevil again, drunk in the suit at his own birthday party, handing the company to Pepper, and the movie explains it in one line: oh, he's dying. Basically a midlife crisis with repulsors. It's a regression story, built to make him "fun again". I thought he'd grown out of that guy last time. Then the reason clicks, and fun Tony is hard to argue with.
"Convoluted" was the word that Waifu and I settled on. And the "new element" never comes up again as far as either of us remembers, which makes it the most expensive side quest in the franchise. Don't get me wrong: it does its job here, and the father reel it leads to is one of the movie's best touches.
Then Black Widow walks in, isn't on screen much, and steals the show anyway. Scarlett Johansson's undercover act alone is worth the rewatch: she's flirting, she's teasing, and the whole time she's analyzing Tony, testing him, while he thinks he's the one running the interview. The hallway fight was, I think, the first time movies gave a woman the whole spinny kick thingy, and it still looks good. Waifu remembered the moves being a lot cooler; her verdict now is that things have evolved but the charm is still there, and that casting is the one thing Marvel is almost always on point with. Tony meets her and tells Pepper, "I want one." I get it, brother... I get it.
The villains are where Waifu and I split. Ivan Vanko (Mickey Rourke) is a rough-looking guy with silver teeth and tattoos all over (prison, I assume) who is also a genius engineer, and I haven't been able to reconcile those two archetypes in my mind since 2010. When he fights it's two whips and a snarl, a bit underwhelming for a man the movie keeps calling brilliant. His coolest moment, the two guards he hangs, happens off screen, and I'd have paid extra to see it.
But we agreed: the actor is good, the script isn't. Same ruling on Justin Hammer (Sam Rockwell), the other half of the problem, a caricature so stupid that I laughed at him when I was younger and find him a little annoying now. Waifu finds him annoying too, and gives Rockwell the credit: anyone who can annoy you on purpose is doing something right. He did the job. I'm the one who outgrew the joke.
The set pieces are where this movie earns its keep, twice. Monaco first. The suitcase suit was the one scene I kept: sixteen years, and that briefcase was all my brain filed under Iron Man 2. It's still cool. Then the finale: the drone fight is really fun, more action and better effects than the first one, and War Machine is awesome. Rhodey (Don Cheadle, in for Terrence Howard) fires like a machine gun instead of a laser beam, and I'd buy the armor for the sound alone.
Counsel for the defense: Vanko built the tech in a hurry, but every part came from Hammer, and Hammer is an idiot, so it's just inferior stuff. Also, Tony is in the evolved suit by then; the drones are shooting at a version of him that no longer exists. The final boss is another matter. He shows up after his army is already scrap and the fight is over so fast it's kind of stupid. Maybe deploy alongside them next time and overwhelm the enemy like a sensible warlord. But here Waifu made a good point: he probably didn't have the tech to control the drone army from his suit. Fair. The man had a laptop, a cockatoo and a deadline.
The supporting cast got better. We saw it coming, and it still made us happy. Pepper Potts (Gwyneth Paltrow) has more emotional range this time, and I think it comes with the script finally giving her some. Happy Hogan is Jon Favreau directing himself into a boxing ring to get humiliated by Natasha, and Waifu heard it was his own idea (I'm not fact-checking my wife). He's great. Even Dummy, the robot arm that botches everything, is back, botching better than ever, and Waifu's a fan.
Then the bit parts. Nick Fury (Samuel L. Jackson) at the donut place is iconic for a reason: the man always delivers his lines, and the memes have outlived the plot. Howard Stark (John Slattery) on the old film reel is a nice touch, the age-old story of a father and a son who never talked, while the old man was thinking about the kid the entire time. A lot of people can relate to that one. Senator Stern (Garry Shandling) is another caricature side villain, and I like that they bookend the movie with him: a problem at the start, a stupid smile at the end.
Yeah, me too. So here's the lesson, from two people who spent a night relearning a movie they'd already seen: a simple, good story beats a convoluted one with prettier scenes. Still, it was a fun night. Where does it sit? Make it easy and say there are 40 of these: middle band, maybe top 20, maybe bottom 20, and I'm not losing sleep over which.
Iron Man 2: forget the plot, keep the suitcase.
