For a movie about a guy in a metal suit, the first Iron Man moved with surprising grace and a minimum of clanking. Jon Favreau, who'd never directed a superhero action picture before, and Robert Downey Jr., who'd never starred in one, pulled off the rarest of feats: They made a seemingly effortless blockbuster, an exhilarating picture that never let us see it sweat. Downey's Tony Stark, a playboy kajillionaire who owed his good fortune to the military-industrial complex, was a charmer with an ego, and he wasn't about to apologize for it. Like all good superheroes, he had his vulnerable side too, but Downey presented Stark's contradictions as if they were all of a piece, instead of turning them on or off with the flick of a switch. He mapped the character's psychic pain by doing a soft-shoe around it -- hard to do in a futuristic metal jumpsuit, but then, that's Downey.
Iron Man 2 is more of the same -- a lot more of the same -- and yet a lot less. Favreau, working from a script by Justin Theroux (which itself was adapted from the Marvel comic-book series), toils hard to pack more in. There are more characters, more special effects, more conflicts, but not necessarily more story. The picture opens extravagantly, with Stark -- as Iron Man -- making a dramatic entrance at his own "Stark Expo," an elaborate version of an auto show (held, appropriately enough, in Flushing Meadows, the site of both the 1939 and 1964 World's Fairs) designed to celebrate the latest techno-humanitarian advancements and the fact that Iron Man has kept the world at peace for several years running, though not necessarily in that order. Iron Man whizzes through the sky, arriving at the site on his little jet feet. After he lands -- stealing the show from his warm-up group, a phalanx of shimmying, high-kicking go-go dancers -- his Iron Man armor magically peels itself back and folds itself up, revealing Tony Stark in a pin-striped tux, who proceeds to make a self-aggrandizing speech about how much good he's done the world. As openers go, it's pretty dazzling, not least because it so unapologetically celebrates the real star of this show so far: Stark's hubris.
But not everyone loves Stark as much as Stark loves Stark. In fact, no one seems to love him much at all: In Iron Man 2 his enemies include a wily congressman (played by an alarmingly puffy Garry Shandling) who has called upon him to turn his Iron Man gear over to the military; an ambitious weapons bigwig (Sam Rockwell) who hopes to harness Iron Man-style technology for evil, not good; a taciturn, badly tattooed Russian physicist (Mickey Rourke) who has an age-old beef with Stark's family; and a sexy minx of a legal assistant (Scarlett Johansson), who may not be what she appears to be (she isn't).
Meanwhile Stark's former pal, Lt. Col. James "Rhodey" Rhodes (now played not by Terrence Howard but by Don Cheadle, who has more to give as an actor than this minimalist sketch of a role demands of him) has turned against him and gotten into bed with the wrong guys (although the story never makes clear why he'd get into bed with this particular, and very obviously bad, guy). Even Stark's former assistant, Pepper Potts (Gwyneth Paltrow), whom he's just appointed CEO of Stark Industries, is perpetually annoyed with him -- because she's deeply in love with him, natch. Did I mention that somewhere in there, Samuel L. Jackson strides in wearing an eyepatch? And that Stark's most fearsome opponent isn't even included in the movie's exhausting laundry list of antagonists? (Hint: His biggest enemy lies within!) There are so many characters in Iron Man 2 that there's barely room for a plot. Figures wander on-screen, scowl or kvetch for a bit, and then disappear, only to resurface again after you've nearly forgotten them.
At least there's a dash of wit here and there. My favorite gag in Iron Man 2 is a relatively subtle one: As Rockwell's slick shyster wines and dines Rourke's Russian baddie, he waves his hands about flamboyantly, revealing that his palms are stained orange with self-tanner -- it's the telltale mark of a vain boob. Rourke, a slab of leonine beefcake, is amusing to watch, particularly when he requests that Rockwell fetch his pet cockatiel from Russia: "I want my boooord," he demands in his faux-Russian kitty-cat purr. And Johansson has been outfitted in an array of comic-book curvy pencil skirts and tight button-down shirts whose buttons seem barely adequate to the task at hand (they must be equipped with iron buttonholes).
The actors might be having fun here, but it's hard to tell: We get to see so little of any of them as they whir through the movie's perpetually revolving door. Then again, do your secondary characters have to amount to much when you've got Downey as your star? I'd argue that they do. Downey is a receptive actor. He doesn't bounce off the energy of the actors around him; he absorbs it and sends it back out into the world, giving something of himself with it, which is part of what makes him great. But with Iron Man 2, he may have taken the role of Tony Stark as far as he can go with it. His lines consist mostly of rapid-fire quips that sound semi-improvised, and they're fun at first. When Paltrow's Pepper Potts accuses him of Googling Johansson's character, he shoots back, with mock innocence, "I thought I was ogling her."
But Downey doesn't have to do much with these lines except show up to say them. And somehow, even though he's the star of this show, he's also curiously absent from it. The special effects in Iron Man 2 -- which include a multi-iron-giant showdown, replete with lots of loud clanging and lacerating lasers -- have the requisite amount of dazzle. Yet when it comes to dazzle, how do we know what the requisite amounts are? The big problem with Iron Man 2, maybe, is that it so dutifully gives the people what they want, instead of giving them what they didn't know they wanted.
The movie's best moment is a throwaway one: Frustrated and angry with himself, Stark pitches a basket of strawberries he's bought for Pepper into an office trash can (he's forgotten she's allergic to them). He stumbles a little, and half the berries go tumbling onto the floor -- Downey turns the moment into a spontaneous miniature dance, and it frees him. There's not much room for that kind of freedom in the tightly wound and overpacked spectacle of Iron Man 2. This time, Downey is just the man in the iron mask.