Mettle and the Man

Iron Man 2
Dir: Jon Favreau, 2010

Full throttle, action-packed fun.

Tony Stark faces his mortality and new villains in the second installment of the Iron Man saga. Take jacked, pissed off, engineering Russian Ivan Vanko (accented interestingly by Mickey Rourke), add a bit of dirty corporate competition and a pinch of pesky government oversight and you've got enough to keep Iron Man busy and me entertained for 125 minutes.

Iron Man 2 is more fun than the original, because it's pretty much devoid of character development or growth. Stark is a cocky, wise-cracking, self-centered charmer with a God complex and enough money to dismiss what anyone else says or thinks. He's got no emotional baggage, no mental anguish and seemingly no tough choices to make. There's a brief bit where he deals with the possibility that his father was a thief who stole Stark Industries technology from Vanko's papa, but the golden boy never liked Stark Sr. much anyway.

This movie was so enjoyable, I even found myself liking Scarlett Johansson as Natalie Rushman/Natasha Romanoff/Black Widow. The girl does well in a skin tight black catsuit, kicking ass, looking sexy and saying little. I did have a problem with the fact that Don Cheadle replaced Terence Howard as Stark's BFF Lt. Col. Rhodes. I love Don Cheadle, and I think he did fine in the role, but Howard was great in Iron Man and I think he would've been better in the sequel.

The other thing that irks me is that, in the right light, the movie's a little slice of conservative/big business propaganda. It opens with Stark telling a Senate committee assessing the potential national security dangers of the suit to shove it. He's the only one with the technology and everyone else is light years — tech speak for decades — away from the know-how to recreate it, he says. Stay out of the private sector, he says. Step off, I got this, he says. Of course, he's wrong, just like the equally hubristic bankers who flushed our economy down the toilet were wrong. But all's well that ends well. And it does, when Iron Man fells the foes with a little help from his friends, restoring peace, security and supremacy. At least in the movies.