I want to talk about an interesting comic book movie today, but first I guess I should talk about Iron Man 2.
“Doing too little with too much.”
In the third installment of this column, I said this about Jon Favreau’s first Iron Man film:
“My favorite superhero film out of the current deluge is Iron Man, a film which is 100% origin, but reads very differently with foreknowledge of the character. It was fun from beginning to end, and always true to the spirit even when the details were off by this margin or that margin. It worked as a film, even for people who didn’t really know who Iron Man was, or what he was about. Screenwriter Todd Alcott noted that when he was briefly on the project, nobody could tell him a thing about the character, except that Tony Stark was an alcoholic.
Unfortunately, I have to operate from foreknowledge that I can’t erase—for me, Iron Man plays as a tragedy. Stark is addicted to not only alcohol, but himself. This is why, in Civil War, he is capable of sliding into fascist tendencies—he always thinks he’s the smartest man in the room. For someone already familiar with the character and his story beats, each moment seemed to lead into a second film where Stark would succumb to the drink, would find the plans for his suit on the black market, would cede superheroing to his friend Rhodey. It’s also why Downey Jr. was the only actor I could have ever seen in the role. You could tell which film critics, upon the movie’s release, were not familiar with the character of Iron Man—they were the ones surprised at Downey Jr.’s performance. Even the actor himself has said that this was the part that his life had built to.
Having already all but quoted verbatim the entire scene from season one of The Wire, where Sgt. Jay Landsman describes Jimmy McNulty, I should point out that the film’s ending echoes—very faintly, of course—that show’s fourth season finale, when audiences were pleased to see McNulty return to Major Crimes (unless they’d followed the show from the beginning, in which case it was clear that he was damning himself). Similarly, Stark’s full assumption of his title in the final scene press conference signals that his fate is sealed—he’s destined for the same fate as his comic equivalent, a victim of hubris. His one-man assault on Afghanistan, the most politically questionable scene in the film, makes more sense when you realize that the character’s arrogance in even traveling there will not be celebrated in the long run. The film is fully accessible on one level, and on another for fans—which is also to say, it will reward a revisit if the planned sequel manages to execute these ideas properly (and Favreau and Downey Jr. have both insisted that this is, in fact, the road that they want to take).”
See if you can pinpoint where, exactly, Iron Man 2 went off the rails for me.
It’s very easy for me to fall too far down the rabbit hole on this. Disliking a film solely because it didn’t do what I wanted it to do before seeing it is poor criteria. However, we weren’t ten minutes into the movie before a newspaper article on screen claimed that Iron Man had solved the Middle East conflicts, at which point it was clear that the filmmakers had already forgotten that what made Tony Stark so enjoyable to watch in the first film were his human flaws, and that the political ramifications of the first film’s treatment of Iron Man’s global vigilante act were ambiguous only by accident. This doesn’t speak poorly only for Iron Man 2 when you consider that there’s a Captain America film coming our way, not so long at all after that book made national news for a political controversy.
Let’s step back for a moment. What made Iron Man an enjoyable film was its light touch; it’s true, Favreau’s visual sense was perfunctory, but his decision to put his actors up front over action scenes which have rarely impressed (which superhero movies have had truly great action sequences? The only one I hear cited is the train sequence in Spider-Man 2, which I’ve admittedly never seen—Superman rescuing the plane in Superman Returns was well-conveyed, but obligatory and politically-on-the-nose and the School-under siege bit in X2 was too short to rate, even if it was the only instance in four films when Hugh Jackman’s Wolverine seemed legitimately dangerous…come to think, the only two that have worked for me on any level were the Nightcrawler opening bit of X2 and the very brief battle between superhuman-but-not-monster Tim Roth and the Hulk in the otherwise excrecable Incredible Hulk film) was a choice that did speak of directorial vision, and put the film apart from its contemporaries, particularly that year’s self-important mess (apologies to David Fear), Christopher Nolan’s The Dark Knight. This sequel, in comparison, is a series of “and then this happens” domino drops and over-labored and over-scripted banter. This culminates, of course, in Samuel L. Jackson walking on screen halfway through the film to drop a silver trunk full of exposition in Stark’s lap and walk back out, embarrassing decades of screenwriters all over the world.
It’s an old story, particularly in the genre of superhero films—cramming too many characters, too many plots, too much shit onto the screen in an attempt to top the previous movie. I mean, this isn’t an original observation, but it may be particularly egregious in Iron Man 2 because the caliber of actors that they wasted, in some cases, is downright depressing. How do you get John Slattery cast as Howard Stark and not take advantage of his talent? Was there a better actor anywhere to play the previous generation’s Tony Stark? After three seasons of Mad Men he could play the smarter-than-he-looks playboy role in his sleep, and he’s left here to deliver hoary old clunkers like “You are my greatest creation.” Also: as a long-time fan of Aaron Sorkin’s Sports Night I thought the addition of Clark Gregg as an officious secret agent in the first film was an unexpected treat, and he managed to hold his own on screen; in this film, he’s given two scenes, both of which are about teasing other Marvel films. Terrible.
I don’t really need to write this review, to be honest, because Matt Seitz said everything that needs be said in his recent Salon piece, and much more succinctly than I’ve attempted in all of these columns (and thanks, Matt, for taking a moment out to point out how bullshit that cable car thing was in Spider-Man). But of particular note, of course, is his remark about Mickey Rourke’s mad Russian supervillain, who seems to have wandered in from a better movie. Iron Man 2 played ever-so-briefly with the idea that Rourke and Downey’s characters were grappling with redemptive legacies, and given their near-concurrent career resurrections, that should have been perfect to fuel this film, just as Downey’s career lows fueled much of the tension in the first film. But this movie didn’t know what it wanted to be about: legacies, sins of the father, ego…none of Stark’s insecurities in the first film transferred over to this one, when they would have paralleled Sam Rockwell’s portrayal of Justin Hammer. Rockwell and Rourke had some great scenes together, and each of them got to play in ways that reminded of the first film’s joys—I could have watched Rockwell stutter around Rourke for another hour—but given the plot-bulldozing pace of the rest of the film, their scenes were tonally inconsistent and wound up dragging the film’s pace in strange ways.
I’m still not entirely sure what the point of the blood poisoning was. It was thematically confusing—knowing his father loved him coincided with the cure, so it was his self-doubt or something?—and it didn’t add much to the film. Screenwriter Justin Theroux was interviewed about the idea of doing Tony’s alcoholism in the movies, and he felt it would be too unappealing, would drag down the film’s atmosphere, and settled on the poorly-motivated drunken brawl sequence midway through. Why not have the alcohol interfere with the arc reactor, then? You would get a clearer sense of Tony’s poisoning himself because of his ego and apparent feelings of indestructability, which are established in the opening scenes? He doesn’t give it up because he doesn’t want to give up his image with all of the press and Senate attention, and so endangers himself. There, I helped fix a problem and it took me ten seconds. As for the entire “discovering a new element in his basement” bit, I’ve got nothing.
As Seitz pointed out eloquently, and as I’ve spent ages slinging like a sledgehammer, we lower our standards when we go see these movies when there’s no need for it. Once we left the theater, my wife and I, as well as two friends with whom we saw Iron Man 2 (one of them, despite having a much more tolerant policy towards popcorn superheroics than I do, was intermittently bored throughout), ordered food and put a movie on in the background while we talked. That film was the first Die Hard, and we kept stopping our conversation to watch Bruce Willis tear-ass around that tower. That movie is an unapologetic action spectacle full of explosions and one-liners, and yet…And yet. Not once are we talked down to, not once is a motivation ambiguous or absent, not once does an event or a scene lack a causal relationship with the scenes before it. There are brief moments of humanity, every cast member gets at least one solid thing to do, and it is still engaging decades later, after multiple re-views, which hardly a one of the current crop of superhero movies can manage. (Say what one will about the flaws of the original Richard Donner Superman—and Seitz makes a case against them which is hard to argue—at least it’s still fun years later.)