Iron Man 2 Review

[iaria]

I liked it. It wasn't as good as the first movie but I still mostly enjoyed it. I could have done without the birthday scene which I didn’t watch (eyes closed and ears plugged for most of it) but other than there wasn’t anything too embarrassing.

• I was honestly surprised by the Tony/Pepper kiss. I didn’t think that they would actually make them canon. I mean if only because they can’t really break them up now. Tony pretty much completely relies on Pepper and if they broke up and she quit he’d be completely lost, and if she didn’t quit, well, it would be pretty awkward (not to mention a lot of fans would have a problem seeing them with anyone else afterwards). Based off the kiss at the end, and thinking back over their interactions during the movie I’m actually seriously considering the idea that they might actually have Tony and Pepper get married. I totally support that idea but before seeing this movie I’d never thought for a second there would be a chance of it happening.

I enjoyed them.

- I love their ease together (and that scene where Natasha is introduced and Tony sits with Pepper and crosses his legs but then re-crosses them to be the same as hers).
- They bickered a lot more than in the previous movie but I enjoyed that too.
- I liked him making dinner for her on the plane and then asking her to run off with him.
- I liked Tony’s – “I need you too, that’s what I’m trying to say.”
- I like that his first thought when he realised the machines were going to blow was for Pepper.
- I liked that he rescued her (though I really wish that she had been attempting to rescue herself when he did it). I like that kind of ties in with how she saves his butt on the racetrack by driving into danger to help him.
- I like that she would take such a physical risk for him even though she is clearly not a fighter and violence makes her uncomfortable/worried/upset (see her reactions to Natasha kicking Happy’s ass and getting physical with Hammer).

• Now I want the fic where Tony starts teaching Pepper self-defence. Or, alternatively I would take Natasha teaching Pepper self-defence/martial arts (at Pepper’s instigation) and the two of them becoming friends. Hmm, yes, option two please.

• I wish we had gotten more of Pepper’s side of things. Up until the kiss all the looks/declarations were on Tony’s side.

• “Trying to figure out who a worthy successor would be. Then I realised – it’s you. It’s always been you.” – Tony. I can’t disagree with that. I mean Pepper has pretty much been running it for awhile now. But more than that – that last line wasn’t just about the company, or at least so it seemed to me. For Tony it’s always been Pepper for him. A part of him has probably always known that but he ignored it until this movie when he found himself dying and suddenly not acknowledging it got harder and harder to do.

• I loved Tony making Pepper Chairman and CEO of Stark Enterprises. I was surprised that she accepted it so easily though. I was expecting some protesting. I’d thought when he told/asked her that she would simply take on that role and I wasn’t expecting the paperwork and Tony actually signing over the company to her. Man, I wish we’d gotten reaction to that because holy crap there must have been such a storm. We got that short clip of O’Reilly being O’Reilly (and calling her Tony’s ‘secretary’) but I want more. The board of directors while probably very used to dealing with Pepper probably freaked out.

Another non-reaction that felt weird was to Tony’s... um, breakdown, at his birthday party. It would have been all over the news and so it would have been nice to have seen something of it; even just in the background on Tony’s monitors while working in his shop. Something. It made me surprised that when Iron Man showed up at the expo he was greeted unreservedly with cheers. The rumours should have been going crazy especially about Tony’s sanity. We got these two huge moments – not just for the characters but that would make a splash in the world – and yet we got no reactions to either. Sigh.

• So at the end of the movie Pepper tells Tony that she resigns and he responds that he understands and they talk about the clean-up and she says she’ll handle the transition and from that it would seem that she was finished with being CEO. But then we close out of that scene with Tony telling Pepper “I don’t accept.” So I think it could be open on whether or not she will continue as CEO or not. Personally I really hope she does.

• I wonder how the movie could have gone differently if Tony had confided about dying to Pepper at the beginning of the film? I don’t think the birthday party would have happened or happened like that at all.

• I really wish that they hadn’t cut the scene from the trailers – Pepper kissing Tony’s helmet before throwing it out the plane and him calling out ‘you complete me’ – from the beginning of the movie. Not only was it an excellent scene but I think narratively it was important that it be there considering how the movie played out. Actually it’s needed for two connected but different reasons –

1) The Kiss. It makes sense to start the movie with Tony asking Pepper for a kiss and her kissing the helmet continue through to him almost kissing her while drunk and then finally have them actually kissing at the end of the episode. That’s three acts there and without that first part it’s uneven as is -

2) Tony’s feelings for Pepper. In the cut scene we start with Tony asking Pepper for a ‘smooch’ and then telling her “You complete me.” as he jumps out of the plane. The whole thing comes of very... joking. Very Tony, and certainly not a serious declaration (and I think that goes along with him eye flirting with Natasha in the beginning). Then mid way through the film that thread started with the ‘joking’ on the plane in the cut scene is brought up again when Tony is drunk and suddenly there’s more seriousness in the joking, and that is taken even further when Tony goes to Pepper’s office to apologise. In that scene it is clearly about more than an apology, and though he doesn’t get to say it, it’s Tony trying to very seriously tell Pepper that she does indeed ‘complete him’. Finally, the movie ends with that thread that began in the cut scene – Tony confessing himself to Pepper – and lets him say it.

I just really feel like this scene needed to be in the movie.

• I was so happy that Pepper and Natasha appeared to get along and work well together. I loved the shots of them together – them sitting together though working separately at the mansion, Natasha bringing something for Pepper at look at at her office, the two of them arriving at the expo together (and sitting together)... There wasn’t really any substance to their scenes but I loved them all the same. It’s a shame we can’t have two female characters lead in an action movie.

• But at the same time while I felt TPTB did well with Pepper/Natasha (though they could always do better) the movie also had that really distasteful exchange between Pepper/Tony and Christine Everhart. “Well, she did quite a spread on Tony last year.” Ugh, seriously, was that really necessary? Wait, let me answer – no! God. It was disgusting and pointless and unnecessarily nasty. It was definitely the worst moment of the film for me. (It wasn’t the only moment of gender fail but the others – the dancing women, Hammer using ‘bitches’ and calling Pepper ‘honey’, O’Reilly’s little cameo, Happy watching Natasha change – are things I’m kind of resigned to.) I prefer to forget that scene ever happened.

• Natasha was pretty great. I loved how professional and competent she was throughout. Her fight scene was very impressive. What’s so awesome about it is that, as far as I know, Natasha is completely human (no mutant abilities) and she can kick serious ass. I hope the Black Widow is part of the Avengers. I thought Scarlett did a good job.

• When I heard about the casting change of Rhodey’s character from Terrance Howard to Don Cheadle I was really, really not happy. I hate when a character’s actor is changed. That said I thought Don Cheadle did a great job and I wasn’t in any way taking out of the movie by the change in actor. Now, I haven’t watched the first movie in awhile and I definitely think that if I watched them back to back it will bug me again but for the movie – it didn’t. I thought Don Cheadle was excellent.

• One issue I had was that I didn’t quite get the same feeling of deep friendship between Rhodey and Tony in this movie. When I think of Rhodey in the first movie the first scene that always comes to mind was Rhodey finding Tony in the desert after his escape. It was one of my favourite scenes and you really felt Rhodey’s love for Tony. Perhaps the issue with this film wasn’t so much because of Don but because the two characters were at odds but I missed that.

ETA: ... Oh, wait, watching it the second time I liked them more and more importantly I noticed that during the scene where War Machine is under Whiplash’s control and he has Iron Man pined to the ground, Rhodey says “Tony.” and in that one word I very much got Rhodey’s terror and panic that he would kill Tony and the pain that idea caused him. That worked for me.

• “I lost both you kids in the divorce.” – Tony. Okay, how does this even work? I mean isn’t Natasha’s job to watch Tony? But, fine, I can hand wave that but Happy isn’t so easy. I never got the impression that Happy was a Stark Enterprises employee but rather he was Tony’s personal driver and either way I just can’t see him calling Pepper boss (with Tony right there) after working for her for a couple days/weeks or however long it was. Okay, no, it’s not ‘either way’ because Happy doesn’t work for SI!

• When Tony went backstage at the Expo opening and took a blood reading I somehow read the ‘blood toxicity’ as measuring his blood alcohol level. So it took me completely by surprise when I figured out he was slowly dying.

• The whole Monaco section was excellent. I loved Pepper and Happy immediately heading out onto the track with the suitcase armour as soon as they knew there was trouble and that Happy ran right into Whiplash. I also loved that Tony had to survive and defend himself for a couple minutes before getting his suit. The whole ‘portable armour in a suitcase’ was as awesome as it appeared in the trailer.

• I was surprised by how limited a role JARVIS had in this movie. I remembered even thinking about it while still watching. In the first movie he was a supporting character in his own right but in this movie he’s barely there and I would have thought he would have been in this episode even more. When Tony was drunk and losing it during the party I would have expected Pepper to conspire with JARVIS. Tony being ‘grounded’ by SHIELD was another time I was expecting to see him as was the final battle. It just came off strange how much he wasn’t in the movie.

• I prefer the look of the circular arc reactor to the look of the new triangle version.

• Happy’s happy “I got him.” and then looking up to find some of the men Natasha took out made me laugh. As did the fact that he bit his opponent’s ear – an action I think more people would associate with a woman.

• I thought Tony stayed at the expo far too long before deciding to take the fight away from it. As soon as he cleared the roof of the building he should have been leading them away.

• “I’m going to stay until the park is clear.” – Pepper. Couldn’t they have given her a better reason to stay behind? Or at least had her do something? Between this scene and the next time we see her is the entire Iron Man/Whiplash/War Machine fight and yet she hasn’t moved from that same spot. What was she doing? I also wish that when she saw the red beeping she had started to run instead of standing there staring at it in confusion. Pepper isn’t an idiot she should have realised at the least that it was bad.

• I liked both Natasha and Rhodey’s reactions to Tony and Pepper interactions. The Tony/Pepper back-and-forth about him dying and Natasha watching it like a tennis match amused me but her “Hey, hey, save it for the honeymoon.” made me laugh. Rhodey casually sitting on the roof at the end and telling them he thought their kiss was ‘weird’ amused me (I loved that they didn’t even notice him so engrossed with each other they were) and it was his “I was here first. Get a roof.” made me laugh. I think I could watch an hour of nothing but Tony and Pepper arguing as people around them observe and react – Happy, Christine, JARVIS, Fury... it’d be fun.

• So was Rhodey really planning on returning his suit at the end there? I don’t think his bosses would like that!