Weekly meditations from your humble messenger
Just
Another Iron on the Fire
(Iron Man 2, 5/17/10)
By Nicholas Nicastro
In
the story from the Bible, King Nebuchadnezzar dreams of a statue with
a head of gold, torso of silver, legs of iron, and feet of clay. The
prophet Daniel interprets this as a vision of the descent of mankind,
with each empire always inferior to its predecessor. Hollywood's Iron
Man franchise isn't quite in "feet of clay" territory, but
with Iron Man 2 we're not speaking of precious metal anymore. "Legs
of iron" sounds just about right.
Last we saw, billionaire Tony Stark
(Robert Downey Jr.) had made himself a superhero by fashioning an awesome
armored suit that flies, shoots laser beams and—one supposes—opens
garage doors and slices tomatoes paper-thin. Stark's technology is matched
by his turbo-powered ego: eschewing the contrivance of a "secret
identity," he simply declares himself to be Iron Man on national
TV. Now his cheek has landed him in the crosshairs of the Feds. Citing
national security concerns, Big Bad Government (personified here by
Senator Garry Shandling) demands access to Stark's technology. Nor are
things much better at Tony's Cliffside mansion: his girlfriend/Girl
Friday Virginia "Pepper" Potts (Gwyneth Paltrow) is upset
for some reason, over-use of the suit is slowly poisoning him, and a
lunatic Russian physicist (Mickey Rourke) is about to unleash his low-rent
version of Iron Man. What's a plutocrat playboy entrepreneur one-man
strategic weapon system to do?
2008's Iron Man was something
of a surprise in that it came late to the party of big screen superheroes,
but pretended the fun only really began when it arrived. Its appeal
was rooted in Downey's curious mix of can-do optimism and sh*t-eating
worldiness—you might call him "post-jaded." Indeed, Iron
Man practically qualified as a metaphor for Downey's career, with so
much promise for good hampered by the knot of unrestrained appetites
within. It makes a degree of sense, then, that Justin Theroux's script
for number 2 is a "price of celebrity" story, with all the
elements in Tony's charmed life threatening to pull him apart. Just
to make the parallel crystal clear, Theroux throws in a Hollywood party
scene where Stark/Downey gets ugly drunk, pisses his super-suit, and
wows the groupies by shooting watermelons with lasers from his palms.
At this point, Downey's act still
appeals, but is getting close to the line between "somewhat amusing"
and "tiresome." Theroux and director Favreau also manage to
get less than they could have from Mickey Rourke. Playing a typical
Russian physicist (you know, the kind with ripped bod, blond highlights,
and gold-capped teeth), Rourke gets a couple of fight scenes where he
attacks Iron Man with a pair of nuclear-powered whips, but otherwise
spends the movie muttering and tinkering in his lab. This is not much
from an actor who oozes character just sitting in a chair. Alas, other
than Downey, the only crumbs of fun come from Sam Rockwell's performance
as Stark's half-facetious, half-crazy rival in the arms trade, and from
seeing Scarlett Johansson— playing an otherwise superfluous character—don
a skin-tight spandex cat suit.
It feels like a lot of water has
gone under the bridge since the first Iron Man. In the original,
Tony Stark just seemed like the archetypal American maverick, daring
to be brilliant if only the clods would get out of his way. Now, in
Tea Party America, the scenes where Stark faces down a committee of
Congressional hacks read a bit more ominously. The politicians naturally
want to confiscate his weapons, but they'll only get them when they
pry them out of Tony's cold, dead fingers. Indeed, Downey explicitly
declares that the government can't be trusted with his technology, as
it presumably can't be trusted with much else. "I've successfully
privatized world peace!" he declares, thereby epitomizing the Tea
Party line that big problems are never solved by government, but only
by individuals tinkering in their home labs. Insofar as technical achievements
like nuclear power, the moon landings, and the internet did benefit
from government involvement, their history is faulty. The illusion becomes
outright dangerous when this mistrust goes so far that truly big problems
like the climate change and loose nukes—problems so big their solutions
must involve government—go unaddressed.
When a guy like Tony Stark fixes
global warming, he'll richly deserve a superhero status and a personal
assistant in a cat suit. Until then, I'll stick with Senator Shandling.
©2010 Nicholas Nicastro
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