ELATING, if politically confusing, Iron Man 2 serves up the pleasures of a gorgeous and energetic superhero film. It’s buffered with emotional underpinning and time-outs: the crisis-struck rocketman lounging forlornly in the center of L.A.’s Randy’s Donuts sign, for instance, sitting dejectedly in what was once the living room of his house, and what is now the patio, thanks to a drunken flameout. It’s difficult to make a young audience care about a midlife crisis in a 40ish man with a heart condition, but Iron Man 2 might do it. Robert Downey Jr.’s arrogance and wit power the film. There’s verve in the Howard Hawks–like overlapping dialogue between Downey’s Tony Stark and Gwyneth Paltrow’s Pepper, playing impossible boss and harried secretary. Paltrow has never had to hit such fast pitching, and this challenge elates her, too; the smooth screwball comedy is played fast and tight.
Justin Theroux’s clever script brings us to a Tony Stark who has “privatized world peace” and now is a some libertarian’s dream of an enlightened munitions factory owner. Nobody knows that Stark is slowly succumbing to heavy-metal poisoning from the palladium in his atomic pacemaker. The Senate (especially one pesky solon, played by Gary Shandling) is giving him grief. And vengeance is brewing in Russia, where Ivan Vanko (Mickey Rourke), a physicist with enough Eastern Promises tattoos for a dozen criminals, is preparing his own version of the Iron Man generator. Moreover, Stark’s weapons-building rival (Sam Rockwell, always just right in little doses) is aiming to hire Vanko.
Some have already claimed that Rourke steals the show, but there’s enough well-coordinated traffic throughout Iron Man 2 that Rourke is but one amusing part of it. The middle vamps a bit, trying to get on track, through riffs and wordplay; an example is a fun but not very necessary scene of Rockwell selling some ordinance to Air Force colonel “Rhody” Rhodes (Don Cheadle, replacing Terrence Howard); Rockwell has a bit of fast double-talk about a bomb so smart that it could produce a novel that’d make Ulysses look like it was written in crayon. And Scarlett Johansson’s classic old-movie curves are packed into jumpsuits to play a ninja of some sort who speaks 12 languages; in the middle of the film, we keep waiting for her to do something.
Is Rourke too great for this material, as has been said? Iron Man 2 seems underestimated as thin material—just as The Wrestler was overestimated as dense. Rourke, introduced dangling a vodka bottle from a nerveless hand, staring into a wall, gets to be the Bear That Walks Like a Man, talking in untranslated Russian to piss off the Americans around him. It is diverting, and as in the trailers, Rourke has a growled speech about Stark’s guilt in particular (and American guilt in general) that’s like the ghost of Howard Zinn channeled through a Moscow medium. But it’s more risky to watch Stark entrenched, heartless and screwing up—the movie touches on the Iron Man comic books 1978 plot line that had Stark suffering from alcoholism. Don’t expect praise for Downey’s fast talk and culpability. Our cinema values heavy, self-conscious suffering and devalues grace. And grace is what Downey has.
Director Jon Favreau appropriates the 1964 World’s Fair grounds in Flushing Meadows for Iron Man 2′s opening and closing. The story goes that Tony Stark’s father, as much Walt Disney as Howard Hughes, had planned it as an Epcot center. (An inside joke: Richard Sherman, Disney’s bard, actually wrote a song in the ’60s Disney style as a theme for the old footage of the late Howard Stark.) The Stark Industries MacWorld–like expo on the site, with its giant hollow globe and pavilions, is a perfect comic-book set. Iron Man jets in to be the center of a spectacularly choreographed chorus line and fireworks show. This glittery image of American too-muchness is doubled, made evil, in the finale. And yet the political slipperiness here—good war profiteers vs. corrupt ones—is a little troublesome. It always is, when a power fantasy loses the sense of where the power is coming from.
There is some reckoning before Stark learns the limits of self-interest. Fight scenes—they’ve got them. Rourke (in the person of “Whiplash,” though he’s never addressed as such) carves up automobiles like an electric Benihana chef. The exquisitely edited clobbering match between Stark and Rhodes (in his own silver Iron Man suit) is a treat for the inner kid. Lastly, there’s the battle-royal finale in which Favreau overcomes any stiffness he demonstrated as an action director in the first Iron Man movie. All this plus Jackson straight-facedly describing a power source that “makes nuclear power look like a triple-A battery.” The rest of the summer’s films are going to have to play catch-up, or they’re going to look like triple-As.
Local theaters, show times and tickets at MovieTimes.com.
Iron Man 2
PG-13; 124 min.
Directed by Jon Favreau
Starring Robert Downey Jr.
