Director: Jon Favreau
Starring: Robert Downey Jr , Scarlett Johansson, Mickey Rourke and others
Of all the megabudget effects franchises, the slick, well-oiled ‘Iron Man’ might be the hardest to get a purchase on. He’s guaranteed to make a fortune, but this hero in a metal suit doesn’t have the emotional accessibility of Spider-Man, Batman’s growling rage, or even the lunkheaded sensibility of a Transformer.
It doesn’t help that there’s a near-complete visual disconnect between our flying tin man and Robert Downey Jr, who plays billionaire arms entrepreneur Tony Stark.
The computer-generated superhero, with his aerial pyrotechnics and stern, implacable mask, occupies a different movie altogether from Downey, whose job is to wallow slyly in wealth and entitlement, and then sit back when the whizzy graphics take over.
With his new-found bankability and knowingly debauched charm, Downey’s absolutely the right star to do this. He’s essential to everything that’s pretty entertaining about Jon Favreau’s ‘Iron Man 2’. Like Stark’s many toys and gizmos, it cost a bomb – $200 million – and, like Stark Industries, it’s simply too big to fail.
Mickey Rourke, as a lugubriously-accented Russian baddie called Whiplash, counts as more, even if you can practically see the dollar signs flashing in his eyes. Sam Rockwell, enjoyably smarmy as a rival manufacturer, is right up at the “more” end – he gets the single best scene, delivering a rhapsodic encomium to a state-of-the-art warhead that is guaranteed to find a permanent home on YouTube.
Stark is being set upon by Whiplash because of a badly explained grudge, trying not to relinquish his patents to the US military, needing to prevent Rockwell’s Justin Hammer plagiarising his weapon-suits, and falling out with reluctant sidekick Rhodey (Don Cheadle, replacing Terrence Howard) over Tony’s irresponsible penchant for drunken target practice.
If this weren’t enough, the palladium core that both powers his suit and keeps shrapnel out of his heart is slowly killing him.
That’s a lot of fiddly gripes for a single hero to micro-manage, and a movie with no dominant threat or storyline to juggle competently.
There’s Scarlett Johansson, greedily drafted in as a legal aide/secret agent called Black Widow, and so obviously there to up the film’s booty quotient she gets nothing to do but pout, perform a few swivel kicks, and irritate Gwyneth Paltrow.
However much Justin Theroux’s script fails in oomph terms (pretty badly), it’s full of good banter and throwaway grace notes; though not as turbo-charged as the original, it’s funnier and less politically off-putting.
If the movie often borders on smug, it’s equally happy to be only lightly reverent to the comics it’s based on. The film is perfectly defendable as smug- one long, high-fiving in-joke about its own sure-fire success.
Iron Man 2 feels like one long, high-fiving in-joke about its own sure-fire success.
- DAILY TELEGRAPH