Tony Stark, the creation of Marvel Comics in 1963 and the subject of
600 issues of Iron Man magazine, is a curious superhero. In his private
life, if that is what it can be called, Tony (being impersonated for the
second time on screen by Robert Downey Jr),
is no retiring, bespectacled Clark Kent or shy schoolboy Peter Parker.
Rather, he's a handsome, eccentric, technological genius, clearly based
on Howard Hughes, who has inherited from his father (appropriately named
Howard Stark) a vast business specialising in, among other things,
state-of-the-art military weapons and turned it into a concern worth
billions.Iron Man 2
Sunday 30 December 2012
Sunday 23 December 2012
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Iron Man 2 movie overview
The first Iron Man arrived at cinemas an oddball underdog — it was, lest we forget, a minor-property superhero movie from the director of Zathura, starring Zodiac’s third lead — and blasted out a gold-and-red-plated megahit. Now, two years on, things have changed. Robert Downey Jr. is, for the first time in his 40-year career, a giant star, while Ol’ Shellhead’s steely visage is famous from Peru to Timbuktu. And here comes the sequel, hotly awaited as one of the year’s biggest releases, the second instalment of a metallurgy-based action franchise that’s sure to roll on and on. The Wrath Of Can, if you will.
Like the sequels to Stars Trek and Wars, Iron Man 2 is a tale of revenge. But, unlike those films, this is one of the breeziest blockbusters you’re likely to see. There’s potential for darkness here: when we meet Tony, he’s hiding from everyone the fact he’s being gradually poisoned by his suit; villain Ivan Vanko (Mickey Rourke) is hellbent on avenging perceived injustices done to his father; and Jim Rhodes (Don Cheadle) is considering betraying his pal by teaming with rival arms dealer Justin Hammer (Sam Rockwell). But Jon Favreau, it seems, didn’t want to make his Part Two a downer. He’s out to have fun, not only in front of the camera (his chauffeur character, Happy Hogan, has been bumped up from cameo to supporting role, helping out Tony in two action scenes and getting pinned between Scarlett Johansson’s legs) but behind it too, focusing on gyrating cheerleaders and gleaming tech over inner turmoil.
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Not that there’s anything wrong with fun, of course, especially in a film about a millionaire with a magic flying suit. It’s just a shame it rarely feels there’s much to threaten Tony Stark’s perfect world. In the movie’s stand-out sequence, Vanko launches an assault on his nemesis at the Monaco Grand Prix, twirling twin whips that fizz with megavoltage electricity. As he effortlessly slices up oncoming cars and advances, cackling, on a suitless and scared Stark, it actually feels like there’s something at stake, that our hero has met his Waterloo. It’s a feeling that’s sadly absent from the rest of the runtime.
Maybe it’s the fact that two of cinema’s most charismatic, weathered actors perform their most dramatic moments with faces cloaked by metal. The climax is a particular disappointment, a beefed-up re-run of the last film’s final reel, in which featureless metal men thump each other until one falls over.
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Little emotional heft, then; fortunately, there’s still plenty of charisma. When he’s out of the suit – and Favreau has the good sense to keep him out of the metal mankini for as long as is superhumanly possible – Downey Jr. continues to be unstoppably likeable (though Tony’s burgeoning romantic relationship with Pepper needed more screentime and snappier patter). Rourke squeezes every drop of weird out of his character, even aside from the copious body-ink and pet cockatoo (though he’s relegated to sitting in a lab for the whole second act). And Sam Rockwell just about steals the show as Hammer, the fast-talking weasel who wants to be Stark but falls short on every level (no complaints here).
As for Johansson, who gets to show off her gymnastic chops in a mêlée sequence with a great punchline, her character is not the villain some predicted, more a walking teaser trailer for The Avengers (due in 2012). That’s a Marvel mindset that dominates the movie, with numerous teasy references and in-jokes setting up Captain America and Thor; the uninitiated will be baffled, especially when a one-eyed Samuel L. Jackson turns up halfway through as Nick Fury and starts banging on about SHIELD, but still appreciate the sight of Johansson in a catsuit.
Like the sequels to Stars Trek and Wars, Iron Man 2 is a tale of revenge. But, unlike those films, this is one of the breeziest blockbusters you’re likely to see. There’s potential for darkness here: when we meet Tony, he’s hiding from everyone the fact he’s being gradually poisoned by his suit; villain Ivan Vanko (Mickey Rourke) is hellbent on avenging perceived injustices done to his father; and Jim Rhodes (Don Cheadle) is considering betraying his pal by teaming with rival arms dealer Justin Hammer (Sam Rockwell). But Jon Favreau, it seems, didn’t want to make his Part Two a downer. He’s out to have fun, not only in front of the camera (his chauffeur character, Happy Hogan, has been bumped up from cameo to supporting role, helping out Tony in two action scenes and getting pinned between Scarlett Johansson’s legs) but behind it too, focusing on gyrating cheerleaders and gleaming tech over inner turmoil.
.png)
Not that there’s anything wrong with fun, of course, especially in a film about a millionaire with a magic flying suit. It’s just a shame it rarely feels there’s much to threaten Tony Stark’s perfect world. In the movie’s stand-out sequence, Vanko launches an assault on his nemesis at the Monaco Grand Prix, twirling twin whips that fizz with megavoltage electricity. As he effortlessly slices up oncoming cars and advances, cackling, on a suitless and scared Stark, it actually feels like there’s something at stake, that our hero has met his Waterloo. It’s a feeling that’s sadly absent from the rest of the runtime.
Maybe it’s the fact that two of cinema’s most charismatic, weathered actors perform their most dramatic moments with faces cloaked by metal. The climax is a particular disappointment, a beefed-up re-run of the last film’s final reel, in which featureless metal men thump each other until one falls over.
.jpg)
Little emotional heft, then; fortunately, there’s still plenty of charisma. When he’s out of the suit – and Favreau has the good sense to keep him out of the metal mankini for as long as is superhumanly possible – Downey Jr. continues to be unstoppably likeable (though Tony’s burgeoning romantic relationship with Pepper needed more screentime and snappier patter). Rourke squeezes every drop of weird out of his character, even aside from the copious body-ink and pet cockatoo (though he’s relegated to sitting in a lab for the whole second act). And Sam Rockwell just about steals the show as Hammer, the fast-talking weasel who wants to be Stark but falls short on every level (no complaints here).
As for Johansson, who gets to show off her gymnastic chops in a mêlée sequence with a great punchline, her character is not the villain some predicted, more a walking teaser trailer for The Avengers (due in 2012). That’s a Marvel mindset that dominates the movie, with numerous teasy references and in-jokes setting up Captain America and Thor; the uninitiated will be baffled, especially when a one-eyed Samuel L. Jackson turns up halfway through as Nick Fury and starts banging on about SHIELD, but still appreciate the sight of Johansson in a catsuit.
Iron Man 2 movie review
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Tony Stark, the creation of Marvel Comics in 1963 and the subject of 600 issues of Iron Man magazine, is a curious superhero. In his private life, if that is what it can be called, Tony (being impersonated for the second time on screen by Robert Downey Jr), is no retiring, bespectacled Clark Kent or shy schoolboy Peter Parker. Rather, he's a handsome, eccentric, technological genius, clearly based on Howard Hughes, who has inherited from his father (appropriately named Howard Stark) a vast business specialising in, among other things, state-of-the-art military weapons and turned it into a concern worth billions.
Iron Man 2
The secret identity that he attained, in the manner of the Scarlet Pimpernel, Superman, Batman, Spiderman et al, by devising the impregnable flying suit that made him Iron Man, was blown before the end of the first cinematic blockbuster, which appeared two years ago. So how does Tony progress and develop? Well, it could be said that he's been shaped to please the right-wing critics of Avatar.
The big political juggling act of Iron Man 2 is how to get the extensive support that the producers need from the Department of Defence and the top brass at the Pentagon and yet retain Tony's position as a maverick genius. This is initially done in two ways. Tony more or less adopts the motto of the Strategic Air Command that in the 1960s Bertrand Russell thought so ironically amusing: "Peace is our profession". The cleverest spokesman for the arms business since Bernard Shaw's Undershaft in Major Barbara, he presents his company in a showbiz-style exposition in New York with a chorus of dancing girls joining lethal weapons on stage, all in the interest of world peace.
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Then, when he's called to Washington to appear before a Senate committee presided over by the deviously smarmy Senator Stern (Garry Shandling), he refuses to hand over the Iron Man equipment to the government on the grounds that it's better developed by private enterprise. In this, he has the covert support of a close friend, the handsome black soldier Lt Col Rhodes (Don Cheadle). The Washington hearing is modelled on an actual event just after the second world war when Howard Hughes faced down his political critics, an incident also celebrated in Scorsese's equally Hughes-aggrandising The Aviator.
Meanwhile, having established Tony as an impeccable combination of patriotism and capitalism, the movie sets the scene for a replay of the cold war by introducing a wild Russian mirror-image of the American superhero. Not unlike the bizarre commie villains Sylvester Stallone confronted as Rocky and Rambo, Mickey Rourke's Ivan Vanko is a disfigured, tattooed giant from the same cracked mould that produced the shambling loser Rourke played in The Wrestler. He acts like Rasputin, has the technical skills of a professor at the USSR Academy of Sciences and has cold war issues to settle.
Hanging over Tony Stark, as with most American heroes, is the shadow of a father who, he thinks, didn't love or appreciate him. Ivan's dad was a brilliant Soviet scientist who defected to the west only to be unjustly accused of espionage by Stark Sr. Returned home, he was incarcerated in the gulag and died of drink in Putin's squalid Moscow. Ivan, who has the means to create his own Iron Man, embarks on a revenge trip that begins spectacularly when he confronts Tony on the track of the Monaco grand prix.
This first titanic battle ends in apparent victory for Tony, who rightly observes, in the best line from Justin Theroux's variable script: "You look like you've got friends in low places." This is proved only half true when Ivan is abducted by Stark's deadly enemy, Justin Hammer, the unacceptable face of capitalism, played with considerable verve by Sam Rockwell as Batman in a three-piece designer suit. Hammer is using the military-industrial complex to undermine Stark and is naturally unaware of the Russian's secret agenda.
As a political fable, it's oddly revealing about current American thinking and it is interwoven with a variety of other topical themes. Among these is female empowerment, as the enlightened Tony appoints his long-time secretary Virginia "Pepper" Potts (Gwyneth Paltrow looking uncannily like a less passive-aggressive version of Mia Farrow) as the CEO of his corporation.
The special effects and the big action sequences are well enough handled. But when Downey compliments Cheadle at the end by saying: "You kicked ass back there by the way", he's acknowledging the conventionality of the whole affair. If the movie has a certain distinction and a suggestion of depth, then this derives almost entirely from the presence and performance of Downey as Stark. One of the most gifted, versatile and daring actors of his generation, he was quite brilliant as Charlie Chaplin in Richard Attenborough's biopic nearly 20 years ago. He's been unforgettable in little scenes here and there, as when dangerously provoking Mike Tyson in James Toback's semi-improvised Black and White (1999), and he was superb recently as the Australian method actor who loses himself within the character of a black GI he's playing in Tropic Thunder.
I was impressed though dissatisfied by his Sherlock Holmes in Guy Ritchie's picture last Christmas. His strange, sometimes fractured diction makes him not always easy to understand. But he exudes intelligence, internal conflict and a witty doubt about the world and its absurdities. To the role of Stark he brings a sense of his own troubled life and upbringing and his much publicised struggles with drink and drugs. He is a man who, having decided that conversing with his inner child is no proper occupation for an adult, has invited demons in to engage with his soul. Downey holds our attention as few other American stars do today.
Iron Man 2 movie cast and crew
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Jon Favreau
Robert Downey Jr.
Gwyneth Paltrow
Don Cheadle
Scarlett Johansson
Sam Rockwell
Mickey Rourke
Samuel L. Jackson
Clark Gregg
John Slattery
Garry Shandling
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