10,000 spoilers ahead.
After contrasting the rave reviews I’ve been staring at on IMDB with my oscillation between various states of boredom, disbelief and “what the fuck?!” in the cinema, I feel that the truth needs to be told:
Don’t let the box office takings fool you. Plot-wise, action-wise, cool-factor-wise, and for just about every reason you’re going to watch this movie, Iron Man 2 is a veritable flop.
It looks as if Jon Favreau thought Michael Bay had the right idea in taking a great film (Iron Man / Transformers), and adding more robots (“Army! Navy! Air Force! ...Marines!” / those annoying motorcycles), eye candy (Scarlet Johansson in an oversized latex suit / Megan Fox’s boobs) and explosions (um..) to make up for an uninspired, sell-out sequel.
Iron Man 2 is very much the revenge of the revenge of the fallen. It appears the writers lacked the guts to try and make the Mandarin believable, and instead settled for a ‘supervillian’ that never existed in Marvel canon: Ivan Vanko is a pirated Whiplash (a woman) crossed over with the Crimson Dynamo (a Soviet badass). As the former he is hardly a threat to mankind; as the latter he is basically the Iron Monger with an electric whip. How terrifyingly original.
Unfortunately, this film, like Stark, lacks a heart. Give credit to the writers for deducing that Vanko’s simplistic need for revenge and bad English lacked enough depth to power a 2-hour blockbuster. They foist upon us another artificial complication – Tony’s arc reactor is killing him! That cool plot catalyst (never mentioned in the comics) introduced in the first movie returns to haunt us in the second one – and not in a good way. Tony’s quest to save himself takes up a good portion of the film – this is a portion filled with irreverent scenes of Stark in a sweaty singlets smelting metal stuff (he builds a large hadron collider), driving fast cars for no apparent reason, and moonlighting as a chemist to discover, drum roll, a new element! How he discovers this, by this point, comes as no surprise to us: his father’s videos hide a message to young Tony, and oh dear, are those atoms I see in these blueprints? Iron Man, meet National Treasure.
This is just the start of the terrible movie flashbacks. Scarlet Johansson, usually the pretty one, seem like a badly reprised middle-aged version of Hit Girl in her role as the Black Widow. Samuel L. Jackson can’t seem to decide whether he’s the cool and controlled Nick Fury or a black guy with an eye patch delivering lectures a la Pulp Fiction. The Avengers references resemble bad product placements. The final battle of the movie appears to be an equally plagiarised mash-up of DragonBall Z and Harry Potter – I half expected a cameo from Lily and James Potter when Iron Man and War Machine decided that the best way to take out a guy without a helmet would be to shoot energy beams at each other and hope for a big explosion.
In the superhero genre, this movie pales in comparison to its suave predecessor. To mention it in the breath as The Dark Knight would be a travesty. In short: what a downer.
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Movie theme song: Bad Romance
Best line:
Stark: (30 min after he has left the ‘perimeter’) Weren’t you supposed to prevent me from leaving the perimeter?
SHIELD Agent: ... I was busy doing stuff.
Recommended?: You’re better off ogling Hit Girl.
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