IRON MAN 2

dMYD
Starring Robert Downey Jr.
Trailer

M

Iron Man is a terrible superhero. Boring, pious, powered by money, he’s a globetrotting guilt-merchant constantly found moaning about how hard life is whilst blasting above the stratosphere in his blindingly fast greatest-piece-of-technology-ever. Which he keeps to himself. He even only became a comedy drunk for ten minutes so that he could spend the next thirty years of comics espousing the wonders of sobriety.
All of which makes it incredible that Jon Favreau and Robert Downey Jr. managed to make a walking goatee the coolest cape-fancier on the celluloid block two years ago, a whippet-smart multimillionaire sex pest who fixes martinis whilst Cyclops cries, or laughs in Batman’s face as he endlessly bangs his head against the grave of his parents. Have they done it again? No.
Well, a bit; this is still Downey Jr’s playground. Funny, smart, ad-libbing and pissing about in an endless grab-bag of scene stealing, his natural charm burns through the tedious dumb-assery of the script whilst simultaneously running eight laps around the rest of the cast, tying them to a chair, and setting them on fire. Without a decent idea to cling to, the rest of the characters devolve slowly into the shining, empty CGI-effigies of themselves that adorn the posters; Mickey Rourke does nothing with nothing, Scarlett Johansson gets her lips out, and Samuel L. Jackson sits around and gets fatter in a disappointingly boring interpretation of a man named ‘Nick Fury’. The only one who escapes from drowning in Downey is the eterna-dependable Sam Rockwell, playing Tony’s evil nerd-twin in such an offbeat and easy manner that you wonder if he spent the 90s sucking on the same pipe of magical talent crack, dreaming of a day when he could headline an incredible film that nobody wanted to watch. The makers have taken a running leap into the stupidity that makes up 96% of superhero films but neglected to bring any excitement with them; when you can count the action scenes in a two hour slog on one hand it’s clear you’ve got a problem. When the best one of these consists of a tattooed piece of mahogany armed with ‘Repulsive Whips’ being repeatedly rammed by a fat man in a car, you’ve made a bad film. A bad film nonetheless saved by a great actor, but the sheer level of disinterest in the cardboard characters doesn’t bode well for 2012’s all-star spread-thin smack ‘em up spectacular. If only The Avengers was being directed by the greatest writer of ensemble comedy-drama of the last ten years, a man able to sum up a character in three lines whilst retaining a borderline-genius for pacing and emotional nuance… Sigh…We may never know…
Still, Iron Man 2. Moan that it’s not Spider-man. Thank Stan Lee that it’s not Spider-man 3.