I’ll always remember Iron Man 1 still my favorite modern superhero story. It’s why I’ll see an Iron Man movie before any other, why I’ll just really go see The Avengers because it has Tony Star in it, and why I will really, really want to like all of them. It had a hero we cared about, a small story of rivalry and redemption told through explosive metal amplifiers and humor that kept pace with the story. Three movies later, we still find ourselves chasing the dragon, trying to find something as tight and engrossing as that first outing.
Like any addict, our answer is always more: more characters, more powers, more storylines, more suits, more scenes slapped with the “emotion’ label. It just comes out hollow. In this movie, the suits spend a lot of time flying around without anyone in them – I’ll avoid the obvious metaphor.
We pick up the new story with Tony Stark still feeling the psychological aftermath of traveling through a wormhole. There’s also a terrorist called the Mandarin who’s reeking havoc across the globe, and the US is powerless to stop him. A little while later Tony’s house is destroyed, his suits are unavailable, and he’s on the run from some glowing semi-invincible soldiers injected with something called extremis.
From there, Stark has to do a little bit of country-trotting and a whole lot of soul searching on his quest to seek revenge and rescue Pepper Potts, who has also been kidnapped. He spends most of the movie without his suit on, which isn’t bad in itself, but the action veers wildly between lag and excess, either stumbling on a plateau or falling off of a cliff.
There are some wonderful highlights. Ben Kingsley’s performance as The Mandarin is by far the best part of the movie, but not in the way you think. There’s a scene where Tony Stark does some hero stuff on Air Force One that, while it has absolutely nothing to do with the movie, is great. This James Badge Dale guy manages to be fascinating in a simple role. Don Cheadle appears to have at least been awake.
This movie feels like a comedy with a superhero plot, but luckily, it functions admirably as a comedy. There’s plenty of laughs, earned and otherwise, but for the most part successful. Robert Downey Jr. is so thoroughly Tony Stark at this point that he can rattle off barbs in his sleep and still keep up a heart of gold. There’s a kid who sort of gets a by by being a kid, but director Shane Black admirably skids across cliché with Tony Stark’s knowing one-liners.
The middle parts of the movie are at once the most removed from the actual plot and the strongest, but it’s the superhero parts of this superhero movie that feel the weakest. The plot makes no sense, the villain’s motivations are inextricable, his scheme unnecessary. We know that extremis makes people strong and gives them the ability to regenerate, that’s fine, but we’re in the dark about anything else. Apparently, you can still kill extremis soldiers, you just have to hit them really hard. Fire is a thing, too. Because we don’t know the rules, we can’t piece apart what on earth is going on in the action sequences. Who would win in a fight between a bunch of super-soldiers we’ve never met and a bunch of empty suits we’ve never seen? Who cares?
The movie is a loose framework on which to hang a few jokes and moments that we’re told are emotional. What was once a simple, straightforward story in the first Iron Man has become so laden with baggage that it utterly loses sight of itself. Tony Stark monologizes in a climactic scene:
“You start with something pure, something exciting. Then come the mistakes, the compromises.”
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