There are certain moments in ‘Iron Man 2’, Jon Favreau’s sequel to his own 2008 Blockbuster comic book adaptation, in which the thundering roar of machine gun fire is so loud and so insistent it begins to edge the spectator into a sublime state of disinterest. One wonders why they felt the need to crank the engine of apathy up to such excesses at these times when it seems to hum along just fine without the aid of special effects and boringly disinterested plotting.
Mercifully, these onslaughts come towards the end of the film, although we have previously been asked not merely to suffer through but to judge both sassy and dramatic a fight between two robots set to a remix of Queen’s ‘Another One Bites The Dust’. Up until this descent, there is much to be entertained by. Robert Downey Jr. reprises his narcissistic playboy arms manufacturer, playing Tony Stark like a cross between the young Howard Hughes and a less insufferable Tom Cruise. Favreau directs with commendable looseness, allowing Downey and Sam Rockwell in particular to improvise as though they did not have a $170 million production riding on them (the only drawback: editing together such ad-libbing leads to distractingly dire continuity).
The problems begin to set in around the halfway mark, or perhaps the novelty just wears off. Poisoning himself to an early grave with his own thrill seeking, Stark recklessly commandeers his company’s entry in a Monaco grand prix, but is cut down mid-race by Mickey Rourke’s vengeful Russian physicist. Between Stark’s lithe panic at being challenged and almost bested, Rourke’s monolithic determination, and the unexpectedness of the harbour racetrack setting, the scene comes close to presenting something akin to storytelling.
After this, it all begins to spiral away, Rourke is neutered, the Wider Marvel Universe (TM) rears its unenlightening and one-eyed head, and dramatic tension bleeds away to nought. Don Cheadle’s Lt. Col. Rhodes is an exemplar: moving through scenes like driftwood, he is given little motivation and no character whatsoever, but merely does and says what is required of him by an increasingly desperate script.
During a scene in which the intriguing life-sucking corollary of Stark’s heroism is solved in the laziest fashion possible, it is hard not to be struck by the realisation that this film, and those like it, actively discourage thought. Like Downey’s other franchise grab ‘Sherlock Holmes’, any mystery displayed here is so convolutedly both dispersed and minute that the process of attempting to grasp it is highlighted as futile, even stupid (yes, we all guessed it involved The Map, but the obfuscated digital imprint of an entirely new element?).
While the first ‘Iron Man’ offered an interesting schemata of contemporary terrorism and the dream of a one-man American war machine finishing the job started by the Bush administration, ‘Iron Man 2’ is happy for the job to remain firmly done. Having, in his words, “privatised world peace”, Stark now functions as a human nuclear deterrent, although the implication that his sartorial weaponry keeps any other countries from attacking the United States sounds less like world peace and more like a globalised national dictatorship. Either way, the games that are played and the battles that are fought are between American companies and different factions of the military industrial complex. Vacuously, the finale takes place in the same exhibition space as the film’s opening demonstration of technical superiority by Stark, and both are just displays of meaningless flash and bang, of exorbitant financial expenditure without appreciation for human collateral.
It might be too much to ask for such Summer Entertainment to contain the trace of drama, but given the scale of the production one is certainly entitled to question the lack of precision. Perhaps when those who are today teenagers grow up, and realise their cultural memories are made of cheap, plastic-covered nothing, they will have a creative recession similar – but worse – than that generated by subprime mortgages and asset inflation. Only the quality of the inevitable ‘Iron Man 3’ will give us any clue as to whether it will be a double dip.
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