Iron Man 2: It takes all the fun and excitement out of the original Iron Man and chucks them into a fire. I'm seriously stunned by how inept the sequel is at creating an enjoyable cinematic experience. Nearly every aspect of the movie, be it story, acting, even song selection, was botched.
To start with, the big AC/DC buzz around the movie was apparently a lie. There are only two AC/DC songs in the entire movie and they play at the very beginning and very end. Way to go marketers! Maybe you can advertise Led Zeppelin in Iron Man 3 and then not put their songs in either.
Secondly, the pacing is horrendous. In fact, it's probably the worst part of the action movie. There are only three (technically four) fight scenes in the whole movie and they all come incredibly far apart. The very first fight scene itself only arrives about a third of the way through the movie. That might have been tolerable if not for all the faffing around in between battles. However, before I continue with the bland uninspired fight scenes and dumb plot I have to address the characters.
The movie begins by introducing the boring, cliche, straight-out-of-a-James-Bond-movie Russian bad guy Ivan Vanko (played by Mickey Rourke). Vanko is mad at Tony Stark for something that Tony's father might have sort of maybe been possibly involved with decades ago involving Vanko's own father, and now his father has died from old age unrelated to any of those events. So immediately the fact that the main antagonist has no motivation doesn't help. It also doesn't help that Mickey Rourke gives a terrible performance. However, he isn't the worst actor in the movie. When Watchmen debuted many people complained about the performance of Maria Åkerman as Silk Spectre II, saying she was too flat. Now, personally I disagree with that assessment but I do understand what they were saying. But Åkerman doesn't compare at all, at all, to the terrible performance of Scarlett Johansson in this movie. Her character is so dull and lifeless that she actually brings the rest of the movie down with her. To be fair, I will say that Robert Downey Jr., Gwyneth Paltrow and Samuel L. Jackson all turn in good perfor-- wait, stop. What are Jackson and Johansson even doing in this movie? The answer: Nothing. They play S.H.I.E.L.D. operatives whose only roles are to market other Marvel movies like Thor. In fact, their presence contributes to a full third of the faffing around that occurs in Iron Man 2, mostly in the soul-shattering vacuous middle.
Also, sorry to say it, but Don Cheadle sucks in this movie. You can feel his apathy oozing off the screen. It makes the movie drag more than it already was.
Iron Man 2 feels like a superhero movie collided with a romantic comedy chick flick, or maybe Mr. Smith Goes to Washington. Cocktail parties, congressional committee meetings, what is this? You know what I think of when I think about Iron Man? Boring political dialogue. What, you don't? Most of the faffing around has to do with the contrived Tony Stark / Pepper romance and the senate hearing is preposterous. That's a good word to describe the plot of the movie: Preposterous.
In the first fight scene Tony Stark is driving in a race car (just because) when Ivan Vanko shows up in his high-tech killsuit he built out of pirozhki in his poor rundown apartment in Siberia. He attacks Tony with his car bisecting laser whips but despite the fact that Tony doesn't have the Iron Man suit and is disoriented after being hurled through the air he is able to just barely evade each strike by Vanko, the ridiculousness of which is so great that we are instantly thrown out of the movie. Vanko moseys along, taking his time, apparently in no hurry to kill Tony Stark before he either runs away or gets into Iron Man suit. You might guess his reason for doing this is to prolong his revenge, really making Tony afraid, but no, that's not the reason. Why doesn't Vanko kill Tony? Because the script says so. Then Tony suits up and the fight ends in (no joke) thirty seconds. All that build up and the first fight scene one third of the way through the movie abruptly stops.
Wait, no one knew Tony would be in the race because he only decided to participate in it spontaneously, yet Vanko is already near the track disguised as a mechanic. The only way that Vanko could have known to be there was if he was clairvoyant, yet he knows. Why? Because the script says so. It's pretty bad when you get into plot-hole territory (too bad it's not the only one).
Later, Tony is being an irresponsible drunk at his birthday party, stumbling around in the Iron Man suit and blasting beer bottles because he's upset about dying. Oh, did I forget to mention that Tony is dying from a defect inherent in the palladium power source in his chest that keeps him alive? So did the writers. In the first movie. How does Tony resolve this problem? He stumbles upon an old elemental model left behind in another model by his father and (no joke) manufactures a new element in his basement which can also be used as a life saving power source but which doesn't contain the same toxicity as palladium. I wish I were making that up. Also, I was apparently completely mistaken in my perception that in order to create a new element you need a team of trained scientists, a highly controlled environment and a particle accelerator. Evidently all you need to do is fire a laser beam into a triangle.
Anyway, Don Cheadle shows up, steals one of the other Iron Man suits from Tony's basement and proceeds to get into a pointless fight with Tony that occurs only so that the movie can have another fight scene, and endear Tony to the audience by having him endanger nearby partygoers. Because they're both in nigh-invincible robot suits the battle resembles two empty buckets being clanged together.
The common problem with these fight scenes is that they hold no tension whatsoever. In the first one the tension is dissolved by the preposterous escapes Tony makes, in the second by the fact that both fighters can't be injured. In the case of Scarlett Johansson's battle not only do we not care about the character but also she dispatches the nameless henchmen with complete ease. In the big climactic battle Tony goes up against tens of robots about as affective as paper-mâché barbie dolls, or the droids from The Phantom Menace. They die from crashing into things at relatively slow speeds, being punched, shot, kicked, and from particularly aggressive noogies. Then Ivan Vanko arrives in his new supersuit and engages in a (no joke) thirty second battle.
At this point everything comes together in a way that is impossible. After defeating Vanko, the stereotypical villain reveals that he rigged all the robots with explosives that will soon blow. Also, Pepper (only Pepper, no one else) just happens to be standing right next to the only robot that crashed near her location and Tony has very little time to fly to and rescue her. Unfortunately Tony has no idea that Pepper is in this predicament and even if he did he has no clue where she is, so tragically she dies. Tony is overcome with grief and I'm just kidding; of course he somehow obtains knowledge of exactly where she is and flies over and rescues her just in time. How? Because the script says so. Then, despite Tony having been a drunken asshole the whole movie, Pepper professes her love for him. Peachy.
