Movie Review: Iron Man 2

It was often said of the first Iron Man movie that it was “surprisingly good.”

It was good, because the characters were well-drawn, the audience’s intelligence was not insulted, and the dialog was terse and well-constructed. The action was terse too. Stuff exploded, people died, but one had the feeling that those things were happening exactly as much as was necessary. Robert Downey Jr.’s Tony Stark was smarmy and obnoxious, but that was okay, because it was a set-up for him to get his world turned upside-down. Trapped in a cave with a failing heart, without access to his money or resources, Stark was forced to re-evaluate his life, and we like him better at the end of the movie than we did at the beginning.

In Iron Man 2, it’s basically like none of that ever happened, except the part where he turns his own artificial heart into a suit of armor that is also a jet plane. Stark is annoying, and when he speaks, he sounds eerily like Bill Murray did in his 80s comedies, such as Stripes, but somehow with much less charm. Downey unreigned is not very interesting. Even less interesting are a number of great actors utterly wasted in mostly nonsensical supporting roles: Samuel L. Jackson and Scarlet Johannsen, both obviously eating up screen time in order to set up some other Marvel movie; Sam Rockwell as a sleazy arms dealer who is supposed to be a foil for Stark, but is actually a lot like him; Don Cheadle as, let’s face it, the Black Friend of the White Main Character, in 80s action-movie fashion, with horrible dialog that doesn’t allow him to breathe life into a role that Terrence Howard was able to do some good with in the first movie; Jon Favreau as a good-guy henchman with no clear skills or reason to be in the movie except for the fact that he also directed it; Gwyneth Paltrow, whose character actually changes, but it’s unclear how or why or whether we should be happy about it; and Mickey Rourke, who is perfect within the tiny range that he’s allowed as a Russian physicist gangster with a weird revenge motive and an even weirder choice of personal weaponry.

My viewing companion, Susannah, who runs an art gallery, disliked the movie as much as I did, but appreciated a few touches that I missed, such as the fact that Stark owns a famous statue of a man made of iron, or that his home is filled with evidence that is was decorated in the 60s, or that the Russian villain’s anti-Iron  Man costume has, more or less appropriately, a touch of the Mongolian in its design. So, points to the art director and the costume designer. Hopefully their work will be appreciated, despite the unfortunate context.

The only character who worked perfectly was Howard Stark, father to Downey’s Tony Stark, played by John Slattery. Slattery, who plays Roger Sterling on Mad Men, appears in Iron Man 2 only within a film within the film, speaking, appropriately, from the 60s. “I’m limited by the technology of my time,” he tells his son, and delivers a terse message that leads essentially to a deus ex machina. I crossed my fingers that Tony Stark would miss this clue, that he would be condemned to spend the rest of the movie that I’d paid to see listening to his father lecture him about the value of patience and the limits to what one can reasonably achieve within a certain amount of time. Say, 124 minutes.