So I Watched: Iron Man 2 (2010)
After suffering through the weirdly oedipal Hulk movie this one kinda feels like drinking a cool glass of water.
Right off the bat it's immediately more focused and is much more dextrous with presenting its themes. You get some shots of an old Russian guy, implicitly stiffed by Tony's dad, dying alone in poverty followed by Tony acting like the comics Iron Man before an immediate smash cut to the revelation that the hashtag #epic Iron Man suit is killing him, and while you're sitting with that, the film handily confirms that the imperialism machine of the United States is obsessed with turning Tony's goodies into their original form as region destabilizers. This all happens in about 15-20 minutes and is more concise than the entire runtime of Hulk 2008.
I'm a little bit too used to sequels being inherently destructive, and I remember not actually liking this one all that much, so imagine my surprise when it's honestly a pretty tight sequel and fitting followup to the original. In many ways it's a logical followup to that mic drop cliffhanger from the last movie; Tony outed himself and sure enough he has to commodify himself while fighting off the power-hungry US military and other opportunists with a stick. At launch I watched this movie two years after Iron Man 1 and thus wasn't really aware of just how well they slot together, but watching them back-to-back (with a few days inbetween) paints it clearly.
What I think the film nails - and later films defile by their continued expansion of The Lore - is that Tony's campaign to keep 'his' stuff is simultaneously well-intentioned but also vastly hypocritical. He's ontologically in the right for not handing his technology over to a government that's chomping at the bit to deploy it against whoever America designates as an enemy and especially to keep it out of the hands of opportunistic whackjobs like Elon M- sorry, Justin Hammer, but at the same time…
It's not really his, is it? The film continually puts a pin in two facts: Tony's technology wasn't built wholly by "Stark Industries" and that Tony isn't the only genius in the world. The Vanko family are as responsible for his continued survival as anyone else and yet he has a single-minded desire to keep 'his' arc reactor out of anyone else's hands. If we're being real, I'm kinda surprised to see an MCU film tackle hypocrisy while managing to balance on the tight-rope of not making either side of his belief system the Obvious Good Answer. Even his promotion of Pepper is portrayed neither as altruism or pragmatism but as a desperate man who is deeply afraid of his mortality trying to Do A Good, only for it to backfire because Pepper is an assistant and not a CEO of the presently most popular company on Earth.
Later movies would go on to venerate Tony Stark as a sort of Redditor-derived hype man with hashtag epic clapbacks and total control of nearly every situation he's in, so imagine my surprise when there's a whole setpiece where he mic drops the US senate on live television only for basically every worry brought up at that hearing to come true. This is a movie that clearly thinks Tony is cool, but is willing to throw rocks at him the entire time.
Hell, if I'm being generous, I even think the inclusion of the SHIELD characters doesn't feel that egregious either, which is a far cry from the tendrils the Overarching Story would impale everything in Phase Two onwards onto. I agree with Scarlett Johansson's assessment that she's basically there as a sex object, and sure enough Nick Fury is indeed essentially brought in as comic relief after some harsher scenes, but like… They still manage to steal scenes, is the thing. That they can effortlessly slot into a film where a lot of the returning cast clearly have an established bond on and off-camera is something worse praising. Even Mickey Rourke does a pretty good job as a screen presence, although I really do wish they hadn't cut most of his scenes.
Not to compare this to Hulk too much, but the action is as good as ever. They've kept the weight of the suits intact which results in more tactile action than whatever the hell that movie was doing. The few physical action scenes outside of the suit are mercifully rare but a combination of pretty good storyboarding and choreography stop them from being a snore, which is something that will swiftly exit for years the MCU once The Winter Soldier ends.
…Okay so if you're at all familiar with how I write, you've probably cottoned onto the fact that I'm sitting on something, and you're right.
I said in my last two movies that I was worried about crossing the threshold where the Department of Defense has a lot to sway over how the movies play out, and while Iron Man 2 is still pretty solidly good, it nonetheless feels like the DoD have too much sway. The civilian branches of the government are given pretty heavy amounts of scorn but the actual boys in beige who end up commandeering one of Tony's suits - something explicitly signalled to you, the viewer, as a Fail State of sorts - are treated gently. The potential evils of the US military getting their hands on a human-sized suit with the firepower of about 10 fighter jets is offloaded onto Justin Hammer and Senator Storn, and the film almost seems to wipe its hands of the implications surrounding Tony giving one of his suits over to an enlisted officer.
There's also this strange… Fatigue, I'd call it, surrounding the film. Filming the movie very famously took a lot out of everyone involved, to the point where Favreau had to bail and make Chef to decompress, and you can kinda tell if you're clued in. On a broader scale the film is operating on a lower energy than Iron Man 1, and while the quiet drama scenes are excellently directed we also know that a huge part of this is because Downey was allowed to essentially improv a character from an otherwise tight script. When Tony isn't on screen there's a sense of malaise, as if the film is anxiously yet tiredly gesturing at everyone to wrap it up, and while I praised Iron Man 1 for how punchy and succinct everything as, here it feels moreso like the film is trying to get itself out of the way.
Further to the point about Chef is that the lingering feeling I get, the thing that sticks with me the most, is that the film just feels compromised. As far as MCU movies go it's in the upper echelons by way of Downey's immense charisma carrying otherwise drab scenes and Favreau's style of directing gelling incredibly well with the scripts he gets given, but… I dunno. I found out while doing my usual post-film research dive that they cut most of Ivan Vanko's less evil scenes, anything pertaining to Tony's infidelity with Black Widow, and a longer finale that didn't conspicously have Mickey Rourke onscreen for a mere three minutes. All of this, and the way people involved talk about it, paints the picture of something Good that was edited and mandated out of being something great.
Also that Elon Musk cameo aged like milk… What's up next? Thor? I have literally no memories of this one so that'll be fun.