Steven M. Finkelstein

In the age of big-budget Marvel movie releases, the pressure is always on to produce a hit. Some of them have been rousing successes, spawning yet bigger sequels that are then in turn expected to make even more money to justify their over-inflated budgets. Spiderman worked, and the second was better than the first, and then by the third installment they had suffered franchise exhaustion and it was God-awful, forcing the miscast Topher Grace into retirement for three years. The first two X-Men were great, and then they brought on Brett Ratner for the third one and it sucked my ass. Then you’ve got stand alone episodes from the Marvel Knights series that were doomed from the start: Ghost Rider, Daredevil, and both modern Punishers, and Hulks. The formula has been pretty predictable. The first one is good, the second one is better, and the third, which has the highest expectations, is the worst of the three; either that, or the first one is so bad that it doesn’t warrant a second. Where does Iron Man fit in? John Favreau seemed like an odd choice to direct, but the first Iron Man was really a breath of fresh air, due largely to the pithy performance of Robert Downey Jr., a perfect choice to play the wealthy, devil-may-care Tony Stark, and also Oscar winner Jeff Bridges as his nemesis. But with the first one being so unexpectedly excellent, how would the second match up, especially with the knowledge that a third (and possibly fourth) must inevitably follow?

Well, it’s good, but not great. This time around, the plot is a bit more convoluted, as Marvel tried to fit in as many tie-ins as possible. We get more of Samuel L. Jackson as Nick Fury, as the “Avenger’s initiative” picks up steam. We get more of the witty-banter-that-eventually-results-in-breathless-kisses between Stark and Pepper Potts. And then we get Stark’s daddy issues…a new villain in the form of Mickey Rourke as Whiplash…yet another generic would be despot in Sam Rockwell…the inclusion of Scarlet Johansen as Black Widow for nothing more or less than sexy window dressing…the emergence of War Machine…it’s all a lot to keep track of, especially crammed into two hours. It feels like a pizza with too many toppings slathered on it. Sooner or later it’s going to get weighed down by all that extra stuff, and lose it’s integrity. While I’m not saying that happened here, what I will say is that perhaps two of the “extra” story lines…the ones that didn’t really feel integral to the plot…could have been done away with, and I think the result would have been much crisper and cleaner. Personally, I would have nixed the Stark with Daddy issues storyline, and also the Pepper Potts romance angle, or at least pared it way down. It’s extraneous, and the “witty” banter between Downey Jr. and Gwyneth Paltrow felt really flat. The fact that they kept on saying their lines on top of each other so it was difficult to understand what they were saying didn’t help matters either.

There’s more good than bad here. The “franchise exhaustion” that doomed SpiderMan and X-Men isn’t in evidence yet, but I feel like it’s lurking, not too far from the surface. If there was any leading actor in Hollywood these days that I would have pinned a franchise tag on, it’s Robert Downey Jr. As a guy who’s come back from the brink in his personal life, plagued by very public drug struggles, there’s a kind of eerie sincerity to all his performances these days. He lends a much-needed vulnerability to Tony Stark, and I buy him as a reluctant superhero much more than Toby Mcguire, Nick Cage, Ed Norton, etc…and backup from Don Cheadle and another resurrected youth actor, Mickey Rourke, doesn’t hurt either. This episode (and it is difficult not to view it as an episode, rather than a stand alone film) feels a little cluttered at times, but the action sequences, when they come, are worth the price of admission, particularly the first run-in with Whiplash at the Grand Prix. The first Iron Man was better, but there’s enough energy to power this one too. We’ll see if the magic has died out by 2013 or so when the third one comes out, but in the meantime, I know that Avengers is in the process of casting, so we should have that to tide us over in the meantime…it’s sure to be bigger, longer, louder, and stuffed with five or six times as many heroes, villains, and explosions, in the mighty Marvel way. My rating: 6/10.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, May 19th, 2010 at 4:19 pm and is filed under Movie Reviews. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.