Iron Man 2

When I first settled down to watch Iron Man 2, I had some problems pretty much right off the bat. See, I couldn’t quite get my head around why everyone cared so much about the Iron Man suit. Yeah, it’s awesome, and I’ll give you that it’s way better than one un-suited person. I’m still not seeing how it’s the equivalent of nuclear deterrence, though, or why North Korea and all those countries want one more than they want other, far more practical weapons, or how it could possibly insure world peace.

Then again, in the movie world it’s pretty damn apparent that the Iron Man suits are all that matters. After all, as a general rule of thumb, if a character isn’t wearing a suit, they’re absolutely worthless. The main villain doesn’t get revenge by shooting Tony Stark in the face while he gives a speech, unarmored, on a public state; no, he does the far more reliable plan of developing his own suit and slugging it out face to face.

While Whiplash is fighting Stark – and keep in mind that his suit is purely offensive; it has no armor – no security guards intervene in any way, despite the fact that a single bullet could’ve saved quite a few lives. Before Whiplash can finish Stark; he is hit with a car. Several times. This leads to the movie’s most surprising moment: being repeatedly rammed by a few thousand tons of steel has no effect on this guy. In retrospect, however, it makes sense, because the car’s not a high tech Iron Man suit.

Even once I’d managed to force myself to accept the superiority of the suits, I still found myself siding with the movie’s villains more than its heroes. Not the disturbingly maniacal Whisplash, of course, but rather the US government, who, as far as I can tell, had the safety of its citizens as its primary concern. Their argument went something like: no weapon sufficient to make a nation a superpower should be wielded by one wholly unsupervised international mega-vigilante, and I have to say that I agree. For the first half of the movie, Stark responded by being arrogant and immature, not exactly inspiring me to change my mind.

But all right, I think we all know I was watching this the wrong way. The Dark Knight and Watchmen (the comic; I still haven’t seen the movie) taught me that it’s okay to look for something more than that guy just got totally owned! in a super hero movie, but that clearly wasn’t what Iron Man 2 was trying to do.

Once I managed to beat the parts of my brain that kept tossing up all the reasons Stark should be thrown in jail and the government should take all his stuff, I managed to enjoy the movie, but even from an entertainment perspective, Iron Man 2 still fell short of the first movie. The main problem was that everything felt disjointed.

The movie’s ace in the hole throughout was Robert Downey Jr., and though I thought his character was a bit of a bastard quite often, I was with him every step of the way. The first half of the movie was based on Stark’s steady slide into depression, and this part was well done, with some very funny scenes. The resolution to all of Stark’s problems, however, felt artificial.

The instant Stark’s personal life ceased to be the focus, the movie turned to the villains. The problem with this was that the villains had, for most of the movie, been playing second fiddle. Hammer’s sudden ability to compete with Stark felt like a symptom of Stark’s problems, rather than a cause. As a result, having him and his psychotic developer suddenly step forward felt somewhat awkward (while still managing to be predictable), and the personal relationships never gelled with the external threat in the same way that they did in the first movie, leaving Iron Man 2 feeling like two aspects of Iron Man’s life jammed together harder and harder until they fit. Sort of.

Still, Iron Man 2 wasn’t a bad movie. If you enjoyed the first movie, or are just a general fan of the genre, you’ll probably enjoy this – just keep in mind that it’s an experience you might remember more for the popcorn than for the plot.