Iron Man 2 (2010)
Directed by Jon Favreau
With the world now aware of his dual life as the armored superhero Iron Man, billionaire inventor Tony Stark faces pressure from the government, the press and the public to share his technology with the military. Unwilling to let go of his invention, Stark, with Pepper Potts and James 'Rhodey' Rhodes at his side, must forge new alliances – and confront powerful enemies.
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28 films that influenced Iron Man 2
What critics say influenced Iron Man 2
Rourke’s insufferable Russian accent reminds me of Dolph Lundgren’s cartoonish villain Ivan Drago from Rocky IV.
Things kick into high gear with a live 'show' for Stark Expo that recalls the boxing ring theatricality of "Rocky IV" but we soon learn that Tony is keeping a secret - the core which is keeping him alive is poisoning his blood.
Jon Favreau's Iron Man 2 sadly doesn't match the great emotional highs of other superhero "part twos" like Spider-Man 2 , The Dark Knight or X2: X-Men United .
It's the fact that great-to-good comic book-style movies like " The Dark Knight ," " Spider-Man 2 ," " The Incredibles " and, yes, even "Iron Man" are interested and invested in clear, coherent and competent storytelling, while bad-to-bland comic-book-style movies like " Spider-Man 3 ," "Batman & Robin" and, yes, "Iron Man 2" are interested and invested in throwing characters on-screen and nodding to comics history so that comic book readers can use their normally useless storehouse of information about these mythologies to play connect-the-dots.
The superhero genre doesn't necessarily require good acting, but when it's there (as in " Iron Man " and " The Dark Knight "), that takes it up a level.
This "hero in crisis" idea works well for second installments of superhero tales (Spider-Man 2 and The Dark Knight mined it as well), giving us a little more character depth to go with the requisite amped-up action.
The hints of something as complex as a Dark Knight or Watchmen are so tantalizing palpable here that I’m frankly stunned that Theroux, who cowrote the brilliantly subversive Tropic Thunder, didn’t see it… or maybe I should be angry that he wasn’t allowed to go where this story is quite clearly itching to go (though that’s hard to believe after we’ve seen that moral complexity didn’t stop The Dark Knight from raking in a billion bucks worldwide).
Iron Man 2 doesn’t stand alongside the great superhero sequels like The Dark Knight, Superman II and Spider-Man 2, but it’s far better than the disasters that were Batman & Robin and Spider-Man 3. Favreau and Downey Jr. have done their jobs well with ultimately forgivable exceptions.
Despite a climactic, “The Matrix”-style fight scene where the character Natalie Rushman (who is doubly known as Natasha Romanoff) kicks some serious ass and takes countless names (while Jon Favreau comically dilly dallies around with a single thug), the entire Johansson sequence is pointless to the central theme of the story.
In a business where the ethos of 'If you can't make it good, make it 3D' increasingly prevails, it's refreshing to see somebody decide that what was good enough for, oh, "The Matrix" is good enough for them.
The sexual chemistry the trailers play up for Downey and Johansson is pretty fleeting, but in Johansson, the filmmakers perform much the same trick as the Wachowskis did with Keanu Reeves in The Matrix: they take an actor of limited emotional range and turn wooden acting into badass stoicism.
The politician has a point: As presented here, the human and machine sides of Iron Man essentially correlate to Klaatu and Gort in 1951's "The Day the Earth Stood Still," the alien duo that demanded the world accept the presence of a robotic peacekeeping force, or else.
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Iron Man 2 Jon Favreau’s much-anticipated follow-up to his breakthrough 2008 blockbuster is less a comic book flick than it is a superhero version of Arthur the Oscar-nominated 1981 comedy that starred Dudley Moore as a drunken wise-cracking dilettante.
His Tony Stark is such a giddy mix of high-order corporate narcissism and disco swishiness that, yes, watching him sashay around the movie is a bit like watching John Travolta on the dance floor of "Saturday Night Fever."
One scene plays like a high-tech militarized version of Travis Bickle's shopping spree in Taxi Driver .
Instead, Theroux makes the same mistake made in Tim Burton's Batman Returns by making Vanko a secondary player while Justin Hammer becomes the Max Schreck svengali.
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Perhaps producers found Rourke’s chosen dialect learned from John Malkovich‘s Rounders School of Exaggerated Russian Accents (“I vant my bort!” he furiously declares when separated from his pet parrot) to be less compelling in post-production.
Iron Man 2 doesn’t stand alongside the great superhero sequels like The Dark Knight, Superman II and Spider-Man 2, but it’s far better than the disasters that were Batman & Robin and Spider-Man 3. Favreau and Downey Jr. have done their jobs well with ultimately forgivable exceptions.