IRON SINKS

Blog entries lambasting flaccid and disappointing sequels are a dime a dozen on the internet these days, so by all means stop reading now. Your time is probably better spent trying to get the plastic off a Polly-O string cheese (that you’re not even going to eat) while watching Jeff Francoeur strike out looking AGAIN against the freaken San Francisco Giants for the love of Christ. You're killing me Francoeur! Sorry that’s just what I was doing.

Still with me? Fools. Anyway, yes, I have to say I’m disappointed by IRON MAN 2, which falls into all the trappings of what can succinctly be dubbed ‘sequel-itis’. It’s bigger…it’s grander…it’s MORE EXPLOSIVE….and all at the mere cost of everything that made the original off-beat, exhilarating, and enjoyably simple. To the IRON MAN franchise, Robert Downey Jr. is the sexy salesman whose charm is indistinguishable from the product he’s selling. If the movie biz doesn’t quite pan-out, RDJ has a viable career hocking Rube Goldburg culinary apparatuses on late-night TV. Surely he and his ilk are the reason anyone in this great country owns something as head-scratching as the As-Seen-On-TV ‘Slap Chop.’ But after a couple of years shining your shoes they can appear a little over-buffed; and thus, as with any salesman, peddling the same act after a while ends up feeling a little sad. I’m not accusing RDJ of not having any fun with the role, I’m just musing on the idea that the role is so utterly fun that he sort of neglects there’s anything else he can be doing.

Not that the failure here is RDJ, he’s the best Tony Stark this mediocre script could have conjured forward. Justin Theroux, whose on-camera work I admire so much in David Lynch films, seemed an odd duck choice to pen this sequel – but, hell, I was game. Not sure Mr. Theroux was really up for the task, it seems, regurgitating up the same-old sequel tropes we desperately do not need to see another time. This is why Mickey Rourke is unremarkable here (I still thing he’s a fantastic in THE WRESTLER and definitely capable of more than we saw in this film). Avenging his father by killing the son of his nemesis is well-trodden terrain, fine, but the Vankos men are so unilaterally villainous here that there’s not anything in the way of dramatic tension – we know who are the good guys, we know who are the bad guys, we know what the outcome's gonna be, and that’s all fine and dandy.

I guess for some that’s as much as they can ask from a quote unquote comic book movie; some people happily divide their mashed potatoes from their beef Wellington on their plate, and won’t start on one until they’ve had the last bite of the other. But I’ve always enjoyed complicating it a bit – having villains who, even if ultimately beyond salvation, at least emerge into villainy from empathetic circumstances. Ivan Vankos senior turns out to never have been the one to create the arch-reactor; it was always Tony Stark Senior (a well-cast John Slattery) -- he's as brilliant and unimpeachably sanguine as we were always led to believe.

It’s boring. Give us a struggle where Tony has to cognate the idea that his all-mighty father may have been a fraud. In other words, give us human weakness. And then, from that lowest of low points, givs us human triumph. Of course this is what IRON MAN should be about, the fragility of the human beneath the iron. The inability of man to control these outsized weapons, because man himself is beyond control. Hence the real struggle in Tony Stark’s life should be what it is in the comic series—his very-real alcoholism—and not the preposterous construct of Polonium-sickness or whatever radiation poisoning Tony was fighting for three-fourths of the film. This is another scripting problem: what’s the point of giving Tony this disease when there’s no chance in hell there isn’t going to be some eleventh-hour cure, making everything right, saving the day. Had Tony’s problem been alcoholism, the struggle is at once more human but also more thoroughly insidious: Tony is the KIND OF PERSON who can lose control. And a gun in the hands of that kind of person…

Maybe I want too much, it’s just the original film had so many individual delights that I enthusiastically pre-purchased my Saturday night tickets for IRON MAN 2. It’s not a slap in the face it’s just boring in a flashy way. And I almost prefer genuine , quiet, library-boredom over tedious explosions and high-octane ennui. Thank goodness for the smarmy performance by Sam Rockwell as Stark’s chief industrial competitor, a definite highlight for me (Gwyneth, Don Cheadle, Scarlet Johannson are all fine…there’s just not much for any of them to do but sit around and wait for the sequel).

Perhaps IRON MAN 2’s failings are best illustrated by its uninspired handling of what can be called the “secret scene.” The secret scene, as a concept, is a gift to the Fanboys: a tacit contract between filmmaker and comic book nerd that promises that, just for a moment or two, we won’t pander you with back-story because we know you know. But when the wink-wink moments are reduced to such brash iconography—the toss-away appearance of Captain America’s shield, the final glimpse of Thor’s hammer—the loving enthusiasm is a bit harder to muster. I felt like I was being advertised to; hell, I was being advertised to. Surely you don’t need to be a frequenter of "Aint It Cool News" to at least have SOME awareness Hollywood is gearing up for the next round of Marvel superheroes; hell, they’ve been beating us over the head with The Avengers movie since the first IRON MAN. Listen, I get the point here, brand marketing and the appeal of the tie-in and whatnot, but I’m just a bit sick of the artifice. It most certainly aint cool. It’s business. Give us something surprising, not just a tag to the next in a succession of Marvel Studios films. I know CAPTAIN AMERICA is coming and I know THOR is right around the corner, the question is why should I go see these films. Because, if they’re taking their cues from this movie, I very well might not.

The other film I saw this weekend was the latest torture-porn touchstone THE HUMAN CENTIPEDE. For all the dramatic press and buzz among horror fans, the whole outing came off as rather a lame attempt to be shocking, but I guess that’s what you can expect when a film wears its conceit so unabashedly on its sleeve. In that way IRON MAN and THE HUMAN CENTIPEDE (I’m sparing you all the details on that one by the way—google it if you really want to know) have more in common than I had expected. Both have severely limited ambitions to be nothing more than exactly what you’d expect.



And I'll leave you with that, to piece together.