Popcorn Lobotomy

How did we end up here!? I feel like turning my couch on its head, pulling my collector-edition Terminator II magnets off the fridge and popping them like grapes, then doing an upper decker in my own toilet.

I mean, us movie fans have already got so much to worry about... Avatar's absence of story in favour of spectacle... the decline of "Independent" films since the release of Napolean Dynamite made quirky into commercial... the repeated rapes of the Terminator, Alien and Predator franchises... and the very fact that Ridley Scott's still allowed to make movies.

But not Iron Man II! It was so obvious what made the first one great; surely all we needed to do was sit around and look forward to Iron Man II?

I guess I'm just mad. Mad at Jon Favreau; mad at Paramount; mad at the world. When I read about the rushed release date of Iron Man II, Jon Favreau's concerns about story, casting problems, I didn't want to believe that it would affect the film.

It did.


Sequelitis

On the face of it, Iron Man II has all the same ingredients that the first one did. But there's something missing here.

It's like when Grandma treats the family to her famous beef stew, but uses expired prune juice instead of cooking sherry because she drank it all the previous evening while watching McGuyver and listening to Barry Manilow records.

It seems like it shouldn't matter. Everyone at the table's gonna eat it and keep their stupid traps shut and be polite. But, damnit, that stew just isn't grandma's beef stew, and everyone at the table knows it!

Iron Man II might have been great on paper. But it just doesn't have the magic of its predecessor, doesn't have the charm, doesn't have the... I dunno, pizzaz!?


The Acting

Downey Jr. mumbles his way through this outing sounding like an alcoholic version of the Swedish Chef. Honestly, I couldn't understand what he was saying half the time. He seems to have pushed the fast-talking charismatic genius guy act so far that he's become completely incomprehensible.

Or maybe the boom guy was asleep, I dunno.

Either way, somewhere along the line Downey Jr's charisma glands misfired, leaving us with that disconnected feeling you get when an actor reprises a classic cool-guy role after 25 years and doesn't pull it off properly -- because now he's an irrelevant, drooling invalid.

And don't get me started on Don Cheadle! I mean, when he's out of the War Machine suit, he just goddamn stands there like a putz!

I can only remember one moment where he talks and I was interested in what he was saying, and that was mainly because of the hypnotic way his nostrils were flaring as he spoke.

I never like it when an original actor is replaced for a sequel. It's always wrong. The studio should have just paid Terrence Howard whatever he wanted, or put up with his difficult temper on set, or whatever it was. The actor IS the character, either bring them back or omit the character completely.

Having said that, I wouldn't have minded if it had been Gwyneth "hunch-backed skeletal waif" Paltrow who was replaced. I mean if there was ever an actor born to play a live-action version of Montgomery Burns, it's her. When she's on-screen speaking, I sometimes imagine I can see little bits of AIDS on her lips.

OK, Mickey Rourke was pretty awesome. And Vanko/Whiplash made a pretty cool character.

But I couldn't help thinking... all this technology in the palm of his hands... an infinite power source, millions of possibilities for advanced Tony-Stark-killing weaponry... and this guy creates a couple of lightning whips? A little too much Indiana Jones, as a kid, hey Vanko, you jackass?

Yeah, the whips look kinda cool, but they are hardly an effective weapon against Iron Man, who, last I saw, has nuclear rockets and massive lasers shooting out of every orifice that counts.


The Story

The first 30 minutes or so of the film, you don't even see Stark in the Iron Man suit. People in my cinema were yawning, checking their watches and murmuring restlessly, waiting for the movie to start. One guy even called his mum to discuss Uncle Larry's bowel problems, it was that boring.

How could Favreau et al have let this happen? One of the freedoms of sequels is that you don't need to waste time introducing the characters. We already know them and love them. You can get straight into the good stuff. Why start with a massive talk-fest? With stuff about companies and court cases? We're here to see people blown to shit with big fuck-off lasers!

And then there's the character motivation. More specifically, the logic of the relationship between Stark and Rhodes. Throughout the movie, Rhodes is playing for the wrong team, screwing Stark at every turn and vaguely apologising for it. He undermines Stark's Expo, steals an Iron Man suit and gives it to the bad guys, and even destroy's Stark's house just because he got a bit drunk at his birthday party.

Bafflingly (in the bits where I could understand what Stark was saying) he appeared to unconditionally forgive Rhodes for each and every count of anal rapage, and continued to consider him a close friend.

I know they eventually had to end up working together to defeat the baddies, but you can't disregard character motivation altogether!

The final climactic action scene was so banal and pointless that I actually I considered getting out my mobile phone and re-watching that video of the monkey picking it's own asshole, smelling it's finger and then falling off the log.

I mean, they could have sent 1000 of those drones. We've already seen that you can pull their stupid little heads off with your bare hands in Vanko's lab, so how threatening could they possibly be?

Predictably, the two Iron Men pick them off as easily as light sabers slashing through droids, despite starting off without the high ground. Imagine if they'd actually got to higher ground! The finale would have been a two second laser display, resembling an intro to a David Copperfield show.

And then, suddenly, Vanko turns up, is killed by simply crossing the streams and the credits are rolling. Wha!? That's it!?


Conclusion

Oh Iron Man II, how I wanted to love you. I had a little bit of love in my heart reserved just for you, I did.

Now I'm going to have to find a new outlet for that love. Like rubbing up against women in business suits on the subway.

I hope you're happy, because the violated business women won't be.

2.5 stars, for being almost good enough.