Screen Machine

Review: Iron Man 2

In an interview with Ain’t It Cool News, director Jon Favreau described his sensibility to filmmaking as akin to “throwing a party” and it’s evident in his latest film. Watching Iron Man 2, it feels like Favreau constructed his film from crowd-pleasing first principals and paid little heed to the usual classic formulas for creating a quality Hollywood product, for example three-act conflict-driven narrative structures or some attempt at exploring a central theme.

For the majority of the film, Tony Stark (Robert Downey Jr) is not even aware of the existence of his own nemesis, Ivan Vanko (Mickey Rourke). Thus, for the most part, Iron Man/Tony Stark sits around in scenes with no sense of urgency or threat (besides an illness which turns out to be something of a non-plot anyway). Samuel L. Jackson floats into the movie somewhere around the middle, appearing as Jules from Pulp Fiction to chat with Tony Stark at a diner before floating off again. The result of this disjointed narrative is a film that feels inconsequential and empty, incapable of being read in the same way as your usual superhero film.

There is none of the thematic play of Nolan’s The Dark Knight. No civil rights allegory such as that carried by the X-Men films. Nor can Iron Man be read as a poster-boy of fascist vigilantism like you might with most comic book heroes. There is an early scene where the screenplay by Justin Theroux (Tropic Thunder) threatens to explore how Tony Stark is positioned within this world and the political ramifications of that. This happens when Stark is called before a Senate committee to agree to hand over his suit to the State. After being declared a menace to society, Tony Stark retorts: “I’m your nuclear deterrent. It’s working. We’re safe. America is secure. You want my property? You can’t have it! But I did you a big favor: I successfully privatised world peace.”

Yet the film is not really making a point one way or the other about the utility of privatising national defence; this is merely a way to enjoy Robert Downey Jr.’s particular brand of charming braggadocio. This is the general rule for the movie: any kind of signifier an audience might grab onto to create  meaning turns to post-modern mush within Favreau’s good-times party vibe.

Yet, there is an upside to all this. Iron Man 2 shows no serious interest in convincing the audience of its hero’s moral exceptionalism and is able to achieve a lightness where other superhero franchises get weighed down in crafting a Joseph Campbell-approved hero story. And what does Favreau do with this lightness? He allows us to luxuriate in the small pleasures – the Altman-esque overlapping dialogue, the manic performance of Robert Downey Jr. who is never just reading lines and always finding unexpected ways to bounce off his fellow actors and the sets. Moment to moment, Iron Man 2 is really fun to watch because of some unexpected element that makes the film come alive. Sometimes its something as small as how the digital animators make Iron Man visibly work just a tiny bit to keep balanced as he hovers in mid-air or the odd left-field intertextual joke such as the unexpected appearance of a major actor from Mad Men. Favreau’s innovation in the superhero genre is to ditch the classical narrative but to bring back style. Think of Iron Man 2 as Breathless for the generation that doesn’t give a shit.

Brad Nguyen is a co-editor of Screen Machine. He studied Cinema Studies at the University of Melbourne, was the film reviewer for Triple R Breakfasters and has written for Senses of Cinema.

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