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fangasmic2010-05-04 05:08 pm
stopitsomemore) wrote in fangasmic2010-05-04 05:08 pm
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[recap] Iron Man 2 (Part 2 of 2) (Because This Movie Is Still Long As Balls.)
This is me. Giving myself carpal tunnel for you. To read the first part of this recap, click here. Again, warnings for this being chock full of exhaustive spoilers, probably incoherent, possibly even worse than yesterday, and the rest of the FG writers still refuse to read over this in the interest of not spoiling themselves. Bastards.
When we last broke away, Tony had just infuriated his probably-European and somewhat high-strung race car driver by usurping his role, leaving Pepper in a panic, asking Natalie to go find Happy before their boss gets hisself killed.
The race, for roughly 2.5 seconds, is going well, and Ivan breaks away from the pit crew and walks onto the track.
First off, shout-fucking-out to Double Negative, which did most (all?) of the Monaco sequences, because these were among the most spectacular in the film.
Secondly, holy fucking shit. When Mickey Rourke hates the shit out of you, he is not fucking around.
Ivan engages whatever terrible chimera of science he created, and turned on, it glows and burns away the pit crew jumper he's wearing, until you realize he's wearing a metal pack all around his torso, and two long, whips extend down the length of his arms, white-blue with electricity and leaving scars on the asphalt of the course as he walks. And as he walks, he starts whipping them back and forth in a motion that'll be familiar to every little kid who ever turned the jump rope for a game of double dutch -- only motherfucker is doing them with electric arm whips.
Meanwhile, the race cars keep blasting toward him on the track, and in the minute you first think that he's going to get flattened, bam, he whips that car into two pieces and the music goes quiet for a beat while John Favreau touches himself with slow motion of the car, slashed into two, flies through the air. Total fucking pandemonium breaks out at the racetrack, and Pepper and Happy hop into their towncar, Iron Man suit -- disguised in its snazzy metal carrying container -- in tow, and start burning rubber to the track while Ivan whips his way through more and more race cars, during which time there's a seriously hilarious cool guys don't look at explosions moment while Ivan is walking through the smoke dusted up by the crashes.
Eventually, even Tony can't escape the stinging kiss of Ivan's affections, and his car gets pistol-whipped through the air and crashes upside-down on the track. Like all movie accidents, Tony is fine, and within minutes, mobile, and trying to save his own life, dodging, throwing shit, but he's essentially all alone out there -- and staring occasionally at the glowing circle embedded in Ivan's chest plate. It looks a lot like Tony's own arc reactor. Then, Tony maneuvers enough so that Ivan slaps his electric dickwhip down on a puddle of gasoline and we get another fantastic explosion.
Thankfully, right at this point, when it looks like our hero isn't going to make it, Pepper and Happy roll up and pin Ivan against the guardrail, knocking him out momentarily and trapping him. And then there was the third agonizingly stupid part, where there's this totally asinine game of will-Tony-get-the-suit/won't-Tony-get-the-suit that is mostly exacerbated by a lot of screaming on the part of Paltrow that I could have done without and asshattery from RDJ I also could have done without and some brave driving by Happy which was pretty awesome.
Suffice it to say, eventually, Tony gets his suit, and the process of the suit clapping onto him? Another piece of utterly stunningly badass graphics work.
What follows is actually my favorite fight of the movie. There are others that follow -- oh boy, trust me, are there others that follow -- but like with all action flicks they're all designed to one-up the fight that came immediately before. The first fight between Ivan and Tony if fantastically tense, it's absolutely vicious, and Tony is a little off-kilter, having never encountered someone quite like this before, and between Tony's mental state -- that blood toxicity level keeps climbing -- and Ivan's loathing there's a genuine tension there, a moment where you really think Iron Man may not be able to pull it out.
But he does! And it's awesome! And Tony reaches into Ivan's chest and disconnects the semi-arc reactor, and riot police drag Ivan off as the crowd goes wild.
Justin Hammer's eyes get wide.
It's simultaneously a boon and a total bust: after assuring the government nobody else was anywhere close to having the technology of the Iron Man suit, here comes this guy out of nowhere. More than that, the public was obviously endangered, no matter how loudly they cheer right now. There're probably going to be consequences to this.
Tony, shaky but all right afterwards, brokers five minutes along with Ivan in the holding area the Monaco officials are keeping him, which is the scene for one of the more surreal and interesting moments of the movie: Mickey Rourke, in tiny shorts and nothing else, handcuffed and belligerent, hair in dark dreads -- abso-fucking-lutely covered in tats, all over his body. Maybe it speaks poorly of me, but I couldn't look away, it was kind of grotesque and fascinating and totally drew my eye.
After critiquing Ivan's technique and being a twat all over the place, Ivan spits at Tony that his day will come, or blah blah blah, something about vengeance. It was in Russian, without any subtitles. (This happened a couple of times in the movie; it was never for long periods of time, and I'm sure the menace of no explanation works for the tension, but it was bugfuck irritating.) Tony leaves, Ivan goes to jail.
But not for long. He's mulling over his pain and his life and probably vodka and things in his little cell when a guard drops off his meal with a sliver of paper saying, "Enjoy the potato." The potato, of course, being a chunk of fucking C4 anybody who was a SGA survivor recognizes, and suddenly, another man with long, fugly ass blond-brown hair is thrust into the cell as well, and a key to the cell is left for him. They're both wearing prison jumpers with the same number. Ivan knows what to do. He beats the hell outta the new guy, blows the wall open, and in the chaos, he breaks out, two security guards putting a bag over his head and dragging him out of the prison, throwing him into the back of a van, and shutting the door.
When he comes to, he's in a brilliantly, pristinely, supernaturally white hangar, and in front of a similarly white plane is a dinner table set for two, and Justin Hammer waiting for Ivan with an offer he can't refuse. He wants Ivan to help him -- gesticulating wildly the entire time, his palms stunningly orange -- he busted him out of jail, and all he wants in return is for Ivan to make him some suits, like the Iron Man. Can Ivan do that? The interaction here is fantastic: Ivan, clearly smarter than Justin Hammer by a mile, can tell this foppish moron has no idea what he's getting himself into, and you can see the calculation on Ivan's face when Justin's asking, "Is that Russian? He's speaking Russian. Is that Russian?"
He agrees to take the job. As long as Justin can find Ivan's faithful friend: a fucking white and buttermilk colored bird parrot of some kind. I know jack about birds.
Back up the PCH, Tony is getting dressed for his birthday party. It should be canceled, especially given the debacle at Monaco, the fact that Stern is crying for blood ever louder, but his blood toxicity is now at 59 percent and Natalie interrupts his staring at himself in his bedroom mirror, thoughtful.
Tony asks her what she'd do if he only really had a day left to live, and meaningfully, she says to him, "I'd do whatever I wanted to do."
I cannot sufficiently describe how loud the bark of fucking insane laughter that followed this really melancholy note was, because the next scene we see is fucking Tony Stark, in full Iron Man regalia, face mask tilted up, dancing around drunk as balls in his living room to a sick beat provided by DJ AM. Seriously. I'm not fucking kidding. The entire screening theater was dying. Firstly: RDJ cannot dance; he has not groove. Secondly, RDJ playing drunk Tony Stark can dance even less, has even less groove, and basically is just fail and hilarious all over the place.
Pepper and Rhodey are freaking out, and after an attempt on Pepper's part to cut the party short, Tony announces the party over -- so everybody hang around for the AFTER PARTY. No lie. I sort of love that guy. Anyway, at this point, Rhodey decides that if a brother wants shit done right, a brother has got to do it himself, and so he goes down into Tony's basement, keys in his entry, and gets hisself tricked out in another of Tony's multiple Iron Man suits -- this one in all silver. (Rhodey, in case people don't know, eventually becomes War Machine.)
At this point, upstairs, Tony is blowing shit up -- bolts of champagne, watermelons, his dignity -- using the Iron Man suit, and Rhodey rolls up, informs everybody to get the FUCK OUT OF THE HOUSE.
People do.
Tony, recognizing some throwing down is about to occur, requests that DJ AM queue up a "phat beat" for this, and he and Rhodey go at it.
It's a cool fight, objectively speaking, but not memorable, mostly. Watching two Iron Man suits whale on each other, while super great for you know, when I want to whip my dick to technological destruction, was otherwise only cool for how much they trash Tony's house. (Wait for it: Tony outside of his suit is actually more destructive than inside his suit, you'll find out shortly.) Eventually, both of them use their Iron Man energy weapons on one another simultaneously, knocking each other out -- and when Tony does come to, his waking image is of Rhodey lifting off, stealing one of Tony's suits. Oh, the betrayal.
Except that Tony doesn't seem all that betrayed. Nor does he seem surprised. One thing the movie has going for it? Despite it's relative incoherence and somewhat manic overproduction -- it never assumes you're stupid, although frankly, maybe it gives some of its less astute viewers too much credit, I don't think it actually hurts the story. The subtext here is good enough for the people who catch it.
Rhodey rolls up to an Air Force base. All the zoomies jizz their pants, and they bring in Justin Hammer to trick out said Iron Man suit with all the best artillery they can glue to it. Hammer, again, is fucking hilarious, doing a full-on song and dance to introduce all his weapons and options while Rhodey stands there and looks utterly unmoved. Finally, spent, having described a weapon of destruction so comprehensive they've nicknamed it the Ex-Wife at HammerTech, Hammer slumps, admitting defeat.
And then Rhodey tells him to install all of it. It is moments like these you realize why he and Tony Stark are friends.
Over in Hammerland, Justin is not pleased. Having broken Ivan out of jail and spent a fuckton of money on this guy, he has produced drones, but no suit, and although Ivan assures him that there will be functional and super impressive drones, Justin's not entirely sold. He even got Ivan a fucking bird -- although Ivan says it's not his bird.
Meanwhile, Tony, having picked himself up off of the trashed floor of his trashed mansion, has relocated himself -- still in his Iron Man suit -- to sitting in the hollow of a massive donut over a donut shop, eating a box of them and sulking. It's kind of amazing. It's like Rhodey totally dumped him like, right after prom, and it's like, what? Why? Girl why you gotta be like that? So what I blew up some Cristal -- you don't even like Cristal! Fuck you! That watermelon was coming right at my face! It was just for a good time, baby don't hate, come on, girl, lemme back in. Feed my fish, at least!
Asked to vacate the donut hole by someone on the ground, Tony realizes it's fucking Nick Fury, and he gets dragged into the donut shop to stare at the guy, hung over and looking like something the cat threw up. At some point, he asks whether he should look at the remaining good eye, or the eyepatch, because it's really throwing him off -- but then before Samuel L Jackson can bust out a can of Shut Your Fucking Face, Iron Man on him, Natalie Rushman busts in in a fucking catsuit reeking of badassery and hot.
It turns out Natalie is a plant from the SHIELD, and actually named Natalie Romanoff. They notice that Tony looks worse than ever, and that in order to save his own miserable life, he needs to figure out the mystery his Dad left him. Romanoff stabs him in the neck with something (HYPOSPRAY!) which should lessen the symptoms of his Palladium poisoning, if not solve the root issue. They haul him back up the PCH and dump him in his house with Agent Coulson (who I recognize from such roles as, Old Christine's husband on the New Adventures of Julia Louis-Dreyfus WHAT ARE YOU DOING TO ME? THANK GOD WANDA SYKES IS ON THIS FUCKING SHOW). Nick Fury gives Tony a pep talk that basically amounts to, "Stop fucking sucking out loud, fucking Tony fucking Stark. Your Daddy had big ass plans for you, you fucking loser."
I know that they cut out some fuckings for the rating, but that's totally what I heard. Possibly, everything that has ever come out of Samuel L Jackson's mouth to me has dropped like a ratio of 86:1 for fbombs:other words. He also drops the knowledge bomb that Howard Stark was one of the founding members of SHIELD.
He also leaves Tony with a massive fucking box, filled with random Stark shit, and a tape reel, which Tony, slowly being poisoned to death by his lifegiving arc reactor, watches and sulks over. It's the same movie Tony showed at the beginning of Stark Expo, but at the end of the reel, there's tons of outtakes of Howard being a twat and failing at life, which is pretty money, and one shot of a tiny, tiny Tony Stark fucking with the massive scale miniaturized version of Stark Expo in the background. It's only at the very, very end, that Howard leaves Tony a message: technology can do anything, Howard loves him, and he's limited by the science of his times, but Tony isn't.
Properly charged-up on nostalgia, Tony sneaks out of his house, away from Coulson's watchful eye, buys Pepper some strawberries off the side of the highway (he pays for them with a fucking $10,000 watch -- who else wants to start a farmstand with me on the side of the PCH?) and goes to the Stark Enterprise offices, where there is barely controlled chaos, and Pepper's CEO office still has a massive stack of Tony's shit, including the scale model of Stark Expo leaning against the wall.
He tries to apologize to her. She's not having it. He gives her the strawberries. She reminds him that out of the whole world, the one thing she is allergic to is strawberries. It's not a great meeting. She throws him out, and when he doesn't leave, she does, flying out for Stark Expo, leaving her new assistant Natalie glowering at Tony and Tony hissing at her that she is just SO RIDICULOUSLY GOOD at this double identity thing in her office. Eventually, Natalie storms off, too, and Tony is left staring at his old office -- until he catches the Stark Expo model.
The next shot of him, he's broken it into pieces, stuffed them into the back of his convertible, and he's driving up the highway to his house again. Strap yourself down, girls and boys, it's the return of the Tony Stark we love the best: CRAZY BATSHIT GENIUS TONY. If anybody was still in SGA fandom, I'd be all, "Guys, guys, someone now needs to write the Iron Man 2 AU for SGA fandom!" but since I think everybody left SGA fandom out of lack of engagement, loathing for SG:Universe, or...I don't know, for gay wizards or brothers or some shit, I will just keep that thought to myself.
What follows is probably my favorite bit of visual effects in the movie, with Tony sitting in the basement of the house, making Jarvis take a 3-D scan of the model and manipulating the graphic of it mid-air, sweeping away irrelevant parts and looking for details. I'm not describing this in enough detail to convey how awesome this section looks, but trust me: it's great. And it's even greater when Tony finds what's been hidden in the middle of the model: the atomic structure of a new element.
This next part is strict mad genius porn, with Tony ripping up his house, tearing shit up all over the place, drilling holes through his floor, fucking stuff up all over the place as he sets stuff up to make a new element. It's like, SCIENCE! SCIENCE! SO MUCH SCIENCE! NONE OF IT MAKES A FUCKING LICK OF SENSE TO ME, BUT OMG, SCIENCE! It's very distracting and shiny and cool. The soundless clip io9 puked out earlier this week actually comes from this scene -- and don't get too excited, that part is just tucked underneath a pipe resting on top of a stack of books balanced precariously on top of a motorcycle.
(Somewhere in the middle here, he gets an evil crank call from Ivan, who has since been tied up by Justin, who has ordered his men to take Ivan's shoes, and his bird, because Ivan has not been cooperative. It would be funny if Justin wasn't such an idiot, and Ivan wasn't planning such a tragic suicide run at the Expo to kill the shit outta Tony Stark and destroy all of Stark Enterprises and blah blah blah.)
There's a laser beam, eventually, that Tony uses to create the new element in a gorgeous little triangular container of some kind -- again: SCIENCE! SHINY! -- and he replaces it in his suit. A white light hits him. Insert orgasm joke here.
And now, all the way across the country at Stark Expo, Justin Hammer's utterly failing to kill it with his much more subdued crowd, but he does have the benefit of a lot of defense contracts, so he introduces Iron Man suit-like drones for the army, navy, air force, marines, and finally, Rhodey, decked out in his War Machine costume, which is so fucking unnecessarily insane that I sort of wanted to touch myself a little bit.
Back at HammerTech headquarters, Ivan has killed his two guards. This is a bad sign. Oh, plus the threatening phone call he makes to Tony Stark, who panics, traces the call to New York, in the five-borough area, realizes the target is probably Stark Expo, and in the grand tradition of awesome dudes, suits the fuck up.
From this point on, the film turns into a series of destruction porn scenarios and big fights, only one of which really stands out as interesting, but here we go:
Tony rolls up into Stark Expo. And by "roll up," I mean, "he fucking flies his Iron Man suit up into Stark Expo, right onto the fucking stage during HammerTech's presentation." Rhodey, understandably, is a little WTF, but Tony tells him something's fucked up in Flushing and before they can discuss it too much, Rhodey's suit turns against him, remotely controlled by Ivan, who is calling all the shots on the drones, too. Insert chaos, destruction, everything blowing up. There's a great sort of sight gag of Tony and Rhodey in their suits streaking over parked cars under what I have to guess is the BQE and some of the car alarms going, and then a fucking fleet of Hammertech drones going after them and all the car alarms going.
Simultaneous to this protracted fight between Ivan by proxy of Rhodey's suit and Tony, Natalie commandeers Happy, makes him drive her to HammerTech headquarters and beats the living shit out of like 48 dudes in the hallway while Happy fights one guy at the door. Scarlett Johansson is very attractive. Let us not digress further into the territory of my perving on her badonkadonk.
She manages to break through to the room where Ivan was being held, but he's missing now, thankfully, leaving the computer he was using to hack Rhodey's suit unattended. Here, there's a great bit where Tony and Pepper, on facing screens, have a fight because Pepper finally realizes Tony was dying. It's a great reminder that these two people really like each other, and that they have chemistry, after they spend most of this movie at odds or far apart. Happy watches while Romanoff (aka, Rushman aka, Black Widow) hack Rhodey's suit back into his own control, just as Tony and Rhodey have come to a crash inside a massive biodome drifting softly with cherry blossoms.
That's great for like, 10 seconds, while they have manly bonding, and while Pepper busts backstage at the HammerTech presentation and gets the NYPD to arrest Justin Hammer. The Expo is mostly a lost cause at this point, and everybody is evacuated, and Pepper, standing on the steps of the Expo in precarious heels, says she'll wait for the evacuations to conclude before she heads out, ever the good CEO.
Back in the biodome, Rhodey and Tony get surrounded by drones, the cherry blossoms float through the air, it's a great homage shot to a lot of samurai movies. I was the only person in the theater who got it and laughed. Fucking philistines. There's a lot of random destruction and shooting and shit, and Rhodey busts out all his HammerTech weaponry, which all works fairly well until he tries to bust out the Ex-Wife, which utterly fails to launch -- "HammerTech?" Tony asks -- at which point Tony busts out some new laser weapon or whatever, which sadly is a one-shot deal, because that's when Ivan Vanko shows up again in one ugly motherfucker of an Iron Man suit.
There's more gratuitous fighting, and finally, in an echo of the fight at Tony's house, Rhodey and him share a moment of nonverbal communication, point their hand phasers at each other, and then blast the fuck out of Ivan.
Yay!
Wait, no! Oh shit! All of the dead drones are ticking timers! Bombs! But everybody's evacuated, right? No! Pepper is still there! Thusly, Tony runs off to go rescue her, just in time, and they fly off onto a rooftop in a grand, orgiastic cacophony of shit blowing up like woah in the background like a big blowing up thing. Remember how Star Wars had those three prequels you could barely see through the literal gallons of George Lucas's jizz? This is kind of like that. Except I mean, I think everybody who goes to see superhero action movies likes a bit of blowing shit up, plus, I mean, again: AC/DC is the zeitgeist, if you do not like blowing shit up, GET THE FUCK OUT OF THE THEATER.
If you were watching Iron Man 2 for the romantic payoff (seriously? really? why? you know there's probably like a Nicholas Sparks movie or 26 you could see like, down the hall, right?) this is when Tony and Pepper babble at each other until their bodies are like, "Oh my God, shut UP already," and they kiss. It's sweet, and thank God, rapidly interrupted by them realizing that Rhodey is watching them on the roof, smirking. It's good for us all. Meanwhile, shit is still blowing up in the background.
The closing moments of the movie involve Nick Fury informing Tony in a concrete room...somewhere that Natalie Romanoff's report on him indicates he's not a good candidate for joining SHIELD because he's batshit and narcissistic. Tony admits this is true -- but, SHIELD will accept him as a consultant.
THE END.
In case you're wondering about the nugget at the end of the credits? I'm keeping my lips sealed. I've spoiled the rest of the movie, you have to have something to drag you to the theater, right?
When we last broke away, Tony had just infuriated his probably-European and somewhat high-strung race car driver by usurping his role, leaving Pepper in a panic, asking Natalie to go find Happy before their boss gets hisself killed.
The race, for roughly 2.5 seconds, is going well, and Ivan breaks away from the pit crew and walks onto the track.
First off, shout-fucking-out to Double Negative, which did most (all?) of the Monaco sequences, because these were among the most spectacular in the film.
Secondly, holy fucking shit. When Mickey Rourke hates the shit out of you, he is not fucking around.
Ivan engages whatever terrible chimera of science he created, and turned on, it glows and burns away the pit crew jumper he's wearing, until you realize he's wearing a metal pack all around his torso, and two long, whips extend down the length of his arms, white-blue with electricity and leaving scars on the asphalt of the course as he walks. And as he walks, he starts whipping them back and forth in a motion that'll be familiar to every little kid who ever turned the jump rope for a game of double dutch -- only motherfucker is doing them with electric arm whips.
Meanwhile, the race cars keep blasting toward him on the track, and in the minute you first think that he's going to get flattened, bam, he whips that car into two pieces and the music goes quiet for a beat while John Favreau touches himself with slow motion of the car, slashed into two, flies through the air. Total fucking pandemonium breaks out at the racetrack, and Pepper and Happy hop into their towncar, Iron Man suit -- disguised in its snazzy metal carrying container -- in tow, and start burning rubber to the track while Ivan whips his way through more and more race cars, during which time there's a seriously hilarious cool guys don't look at explosions moment while Ivan is walking through the smoke dusted up by the crashes.
Eventually, even Tony can't escape the stinging kiss of Ivan's affections, and his car gets pistol-whipped through the air and crashes upside-down on the track. Like all movie accidents, Tony is fine, and within minutes, mobile, and trying to save his own life, dodging, throwing shit, but he's essentially all alone out there -- and staring occasionally at the glowing circle embedded in Ivan's chest plate. It looks a lot like Tony's own arc reactor. Then, Tony maneuvers enough so that Ivan slaps his electric dickwhip down on a puddle of gasoline and we get another fantastic explosion.
Thankfully, right at this point, when it looks like our hero isn't going to make it, Pepper and Happy roll up and pin Ivan against the guardrail, knocking him out momentarily and trapping him. And then there was the third agonizingly stupid part, where there's this totally asinine game of will-Tony-get-the-suit/won't-Tony-get-the-suit that is mostly exacerbated by a lot of screaming on the part of Paltrow that I could have done without and asshattery from RDJ I also could have done without and some brave driving by Happy which was pretty awesome.
Suffice it to say, eventually, Tony gets his suit, and the process of the suit clapping onto him? Another piece of utterly stunningly badass graphics work.
What follows is actually my favorite fight of the movie. There are others that follow -- oh boy, trust me, are there others that follow -- but like with all action flicks they're all designed to one-up the fight that came immediately before. The first fight between Ivan and Tony if fantastically tense, it's absolutely vicious, and Tony is a little off-kilter, having never encountered someone quite like this before, and between Tony's mental state -- that blood toxicity level keeps climbing -- and Ivan's loathing there's a genuine tension there, a moment where you really think Iron Man may not be able to pull it out.
But he does! And it's awesome! And Tony reaches into Ivan's chest and disconnects the semi-arc reactor, and riot police drag Ivan off as the crowd goes wild.
Justin Hammer's eyes get wide.
It's simultaneously a boon and a total bust: after assuring the government nobody else was anywhere close to having the technology of the Iron Man suit, here comes this guy out of nowhere. More than that, the public was obviously endangered, no matter how loudly they cheer right now. There're probably going to be consequences to this.
Tony, shaky but all right afterwards, brokers five minutes along with Ivan in the holding area the Monaco officials are keeping him, which is the scene for one of the more surreal and interesting moments of the movie: Mickey Rourke, in tiny shorts and nothing else, handcuffed and belligerent, hair in dark dreads -- abso-fucking-lutely covered in tats, all over his body. Maybe it speaks poorly of me, but I couldn't look away, it was kind of grotesque and fascinating and totally drew my eye.
After critiquing Ivan's technique and being a twat all over the place, Ivan spits at Tony that his day will come, or blah blah blah, something about vengeance. It was in Russian, without any subtitles. (This happened a couple of times in the movie; it was never for long periods of time, and I'm sure the menace of no explanation works for the tension, but it was bugfuck irritating.) Tony leaves, Ivan goes to jail.
But not for long. He's mulling over his pain and his life and probably vodka and things in his little cell when a guard drops off his meal with a sliver of paper saying, "Enjoy the potato." The potato, of course, being a chunk of fucking C4 anybody who was a SGA survivor recognizes, and suddenly, another man with long, fugly ass blond-brown hair is thrust into the cell as well, and a key to the cell is left for him. They're both wearing prison jumpers with the same number. Ivan knows what to do. He beats the hell outta the new guy, blows the wall open, and in the chaos, he breaks out, two security guards putting a bag over his head and dragging him out of the prison, throwing him into the back of a van, and shutting the door.
When he comes to, he's in a brilliantly, pristinely, supernaturally white hangar, and in front of a similarly white plane is a dinner table set for two, and Justin Hammer waiting for Ivan with an offer he can't refuse. He wants Ivan to help him -- gesticulating wildly the entire time, his palms stunningly orange -- he busted him out of jail, and all he wants in return is for Ivan to make him some suits, like the Iron Man. Can Ivan do that? The interaction here is fantastic: Ivan, clearly smarter than Justin Hammer by a mile, can tell this foppish moron has no idea what he's getting himself into, and you can see the calculation on Ivan's face when Justin's asking, "Is that Russian? He's speaking Russian. Is that Russian?"
He agrees to take the job. As long as Justin can find Ivan's faithful friend: a fucking white and buttermilk colored bird parrot of some kind. I know jack about birds.
Back up the PCH, Tony is getting dressed for his birthday party. It should be canceled, especially given the debacle at Monaco, the fact that Stern is crying for blood ever louder, but his blood toxicity is now at 59 percent and Natalie interrupts his staring at himself in his bedroom mirror, thoughtful.
Tony asks her what she'd do if he only really had a day left to live, and meaningfully, she says to him, "I'd do whatever I wanted to do."
I cannot sufficiently describe how loud the bark of fucking insane laughter that followed this really melancholy note was, because the next scene we see is fucking Tony Stark, in full Iron Man regalia, face mask tilted up, dancing around drunk as balls in his living room to a sick beat provided by DJ AM. Seriously. I'm not fucking kidding. The entire screening theater was dying. Firstly: RDJ cannot dance; he has not groove. Secondly, RDJ playing drunk Tony Stark can dance even less, has even less groove, and basically is just fail and hilarious all over the place.
Pepper and Rhodey are freaking out, and after an attempt on Pepper's part to cut the party short, Tony announces the party over -- so everybody hang around for the AFTER PARTY. No lie. I sort of love that guy. Anyway, at this point, Rhodey decides that if a brother wants shit done right, a brother has got to do it himself, and so he goes down into Tony's basement, keys in his entry, and gets hisself tricked out in another of Tony's multiple Iron Man suits -- this one in all silver. (Rhodey, in case people don't know, eventually becomes War Machine.)
At this point, upstairs, Tony is blowing shit up -- bolts of champagne, watermelons, his dignity -- using the Iron Man suit, and Rhodey rolls up, informs everybody to get the FUCK OUT OF THE HOUSE.
People do.
Tony, recognizing some throwing down is about to occur, requests that DJ AM queue up a "phat beat" for this, and he and Rhodey go at it.
It's a cool fight, objectively speaking, but not memorable, mostly. Watching two Iron Man suits whale on each other, while super great for you know, when I want to whip my dick to technological destruction, was otherwise only cool for how much they trash Tony's house. (Wait for it: Tony outside of his suit is actually more destructive than inside his suit, you'll find out shortly.) Eventually, both of them use their Iron Man energy weapons on one another simultaneously, knocking each other out -- and when Tony does come to, his waking image is of Rhodey lifting off, stealing one of Tony's suits. Oh, the betrayal.
Except that Tony doesn't seem all that betrayed. Nor does he seem surprised. One thing the movie has going for it? Despite it's relative incoherence and somewhat manic overproduction -- it never assumes you're stupid, although frankly, maybe it gives some of its less astute viewers too much credit, I don't think it actually hurts the story. The subtext here is good enough for the people who catch it.
Rhodey rolls up to an Air Force base. All the zoomies jizz their pants, and they bring in Justin Hammer to trick out said Iron Man suit with all the best artillery they can glue to it. Hammer, again, is fucking hilarious, doing a full-on song and dance to introduce all his weapons and options while Rhodey stands there and looks utterly unmoved. Finally, spent, having described a weapon of destruction so comprehensive they've nicknamed it the Ex-Wife at HammerTech, Hammer slumps, admitting defeat.
And then Rhodey tells him to install all of it. It is moments like these you realize why he and Tony Stark are friends.
Over in Hammerland, Justin is not pleased. Having broken Ivan out of jail and spent a fuckton of money on this guy, he has produced drones, but no suit, and although Ivan assures him that there will be functional and super impressive drones, Justin's not entirely sold. He even got Ivan a fucking bird -- although Ivan says it's not his bird.
Meanwhile, Tony, having picked himself up off of the trashed floor of his trashed mansion, has relocated himself -- still in his Iron Man suit -- to sitting in the hollow of a massive donut over a donut shop, eating a box of them and sulking. It's kind of amazing. It's like Rhodey totally dumped him like, right after prom, and it's like, what? Why? Girl why you gotta be like that? So what I blew up some Cristal -- you don't even like Cristal! Fuck you! That watermelon was coming right at my face! It was just for a good time, baby don't hate, come on, girl, lemme back in. Feed my fish, at least!
Asked to vacate the donut hole by someone on the ground, Tony realizes it's fucking Nick Fury, and he gets dragged into the donut shop to stare at the guy, hung over and looking like something the cat threw up. At some point, he asks whether he should look at the remaining good eye, or the eyepatch, because it's really throwing him off -- but then before Samuel L Jackson can bust out a can of Shut Your Fucking Face, Iron Man on him, Natalie Rushman busts in in a fucking catsuit reeking of badassery and hot.
It turns out Natalie is a plant from the SHIELD, and actually named Natalie Romanoff. They notice that Tony looks worse than ever, and that in order to save his own miserable life, he needs to figure out the mystery his Dad left him. Romanoff stabs him in the neck with something (HYPOSPRAY!) which should lessen the symptoms of his Palladium poisoning, if not solve the root issue. They haul him back up the PCH and dump him in his house with Agent Coulson (who I recognize from such roles as, Old Christine's husband on the New Adventures of Julia Louis-Dreyfus WHAT ARE YOU DOING TO ME? THANK GOD WANDA SYKES IS ON THIS FUCKING SHOW). Nick Fury gives Tony a pep talk that basically amounts to, "Stop fucking sucking out loud, fucking Tony fucking Stark. Your Daddy had big ass plans for you, you fucking loser."
I know that they cut out some fuckings for the rating, but that's totally what I heard. Possibly, everything that has ever come out of Samuel L Jackson's mouth to me has dropped like a ratio of 86:1 for fbombs:other words. He also drops the knowledge bomb that Howard Stark was one of the founding members of SHIELD.
He also leaves Tony with a massive fucking box, filled with random Stark shit, and a tape reel, which Tony, slowly being poisoned to death by his lifegiving arc reactor, watches and sulks over. It's the same movie Tony showed at the beginning of Stark Expo, but at the end of the reel, there's tons of outtakes of Howard being a twat and failing at life, which is pretty money, and one shot of a tiny, tiny Tony Stark fucking with the massive scale miniaturized version of Stark Expo in the background. It's only at the very, very end, that Howard leaves Tony a message: technology can do anything, Howard loves him, and he's limited by the science of his times, but Tony isn't.
Properly charged-up on nostalgia, Tony sneaks out of his house, away from Coulson's watchful eye, buys Pepper some strawberries off the side of the highway (he pays for them with a fucking $10,000 watch -- who else wants to start a farmstand with me on the side of the PCH?) and goes to the Stark Enterprise offices, where there is barely controlled chaos, and Pepper's CEO office still has a massive stack of Tony's shit, including the scale model of Stark Expo leaning against the wall.
He tries to apologize to her. She's not having it. He gives her the strawberries. She reminds him that out of the whole world, the one thing she is allergic to is strawberries. It's not a great meeting. She throws him out, and when he doesn't leave, she does, flying out for Stark Expo, leaving her new assistant Natalie glowering at Tony and Tony hissing at her that she is just SO RIDICULOUSLY GOOD at this double identity thing in her office. Eventually, Natalie storms off, too, and Tony is left staring at his old office -- until he catches the Stark Expo model.
The next shot of him, he's broken it into pieces, stuffed them into the back of his convertible, and he's driving up the highway to his house again. Strap yourself down, girls and boys, it's the return of the Tony Stark we love the best: CRAZY BATSHIT GENIUS TONY. If anybody was still in SGA fandom, I'd be all, "Guys, guys, someone now needs to write the Iron Man 2 AU for SGA fandom!" but since I think everybody left SGA fandom out of lack of engagement, loathing for SG:Universe, or...I don't know, for gay wizards or brothers or some shit, I will just keep that thought to myself.
What follows is probably my favorite bit of visual effects in the movie, with Tony sitting in the basement of the house, making Jarvis take a 3-D scan of the model and manipulating the graphic of it mid-air, sweeping away irrelevant parts and looking for details. I'm not describing this in enough detail to convey how awesome this section looks, but trust me: it's great. And it's even greater when Tony finds what's been hidden in the middle of the model: the atomic structure of a new element.
This next part is strict mad genius porn, with Tony ripping up his house, tearing shit up all over the place, drilling holes through his floor, fucking stuff up all over the place as he sets stuff up to make a new element. It's like, SCIENCE! SCIENCE! SO MUCH SCIENCE! NONE OF IT MAKES A FUCKING LICK OF SENSE TO ME, BUT OMG, SCIENCE! It's very distracting and shiny and cool. The soundless clip io9 puked out earlier this week actually comes from this scene -- and don't get too excited, that part is just tucked underneath a pipe resting on top of a stack of books balanced precariously on top of a motorcycle.
(Somewhere in the middle here, he gets an evil crank call from Ivan, who has since been tied up by Justin, who has ordered his men to take Ivan's shoes, and his bird, because Ivan has not been cooperative. It would be funny if Justin wasn't such an idiot, and Ivan wasn't planning such a tragic suicide run at the Expo to kill the shit outta Tony Stark and destroy all of Stark Enterprises and blah blah blah.)
There's a laser beam, eventually, that Tony uses to create the new element in a gorgeous little triangular container of some kind -- again: SCIENCE! SHINY! -- and he replaces it in his suit. A white light hits him. Insert orgasm joke here.
And now, all the way across the country at Stark Expo, Justin Hammer's utterly failing to kill it with his much more subdued crowd, but he does have the benefit of a lot of defense contracts, so he introduces Iron Man suit-like drones for the army, navy, air force, marines, and finally, Rhodey, decked out in his War Machine costume, which is so fucking unnecessarily insane that I sort of wanted to touch myself a little bit.
Back at HammerTech headquarters, Ivan has killed his two guards. This is a bad sign. Oh, plus the threatening phone call he makes to Tony Stark, who panics, traces the call to New York, in the five-borough area, realizes the target is probably Stark Expo, and in the grand tradition of awesome dudes, suits the fuck up.
From this point on, the film turns into a series of destruction porn scenarios and big fights, only one of which really stands out as interesting, but here we go:
Tony rolls up into Stark Expo. And by "roll up," I mean, "he fucking flies his Iron Man suit up into Stark Expo, right onto the fucking stage during HammerTech's presentation." Rhodey, understandably, is a little WTF, but Tony tells him something's fucked up in Flushing and before they can discuss it too much, Rhodey's suit turns against him, remotely controlled by Ivan, who is calling all the shots on the drones, too. Insert chaos, destruction, everything blowing up. There's a great sort of sight gag of Tony and Rhodey in their suits streaking over parked cars under what I have to guess is the BQE and some of the car alarms going, and then a fucking fleet of Hammertech drones going after them and all the car alarms going.
Simultaneous to this protracted fight between Ivan by proxy of Rhodey's suit and Tony, Natalie commandeers Happy, makes him drive her to HammerTech headquarters and beats the living shit out of like 48 dudes in the hallway while Happy fights one guy at the door. Scarlett Johansson is very attractive. Let us not digress further into the territory of my perving on her badonkadonk.
She manages to break through to the room where Ivan was being held, but he's missing now, thankfully, leaving the computer he was using to hack Rhodey's suit unattended. Here, there's a great bit where Tony and Pepper, on facing screens, have a fight because Pepper finally realizes Tony was dying. It's a great reminder that these two people really like each other, and that they have chemistry, after they spend most of this movie at odds or far apart. Happy watches while Romanoff (aka, Rushman aka, Black Widow) hack Rhodey's suit back into his own control, just as Tony and Rhodey have come to a crash inside a massive biodome drifting softly with cherry blossoms.
That's great for like, 10 seconds, while they have manly bonding, and while Pepper busts backstage at the HammerTech presentation and gets the NYPD to arrest Justin Hammer. The Expo is mostly a lost cause at this point, and everybody is evacuated, and Pepper, standing on the steps of the Expo in precarious heels, says she'll wait for the evacuations to conclude before she heads out, ever the good CEO.
Back in the biodome, Rhodey and Tony get surrounded by drones, the cherry blossoms float through the air, it's a great homage shot to a lot of samurai movies. I was the only person in the theater who got it and laughed. Fucking philistines. There's a lot of random destruction and shooting and shit, and Rhodey busts out all his HammerTech weaponry, which all works fairly well until he tries to bust out the Ex-Wife, which utterly fails to launch -- "HammerTech?" Tony asks -- at which point Tony busts out some new laser weapon or whatever, which sadly is a one-shot deal, because that's when Ivan Vanko shows up again in one ugly motherfucker of an Iron Man suit.
There's more gratuitous fighting, and finally, in an echo of the fight at Tony's house, Rhodey and him share a moment of nonverbal communication, point their hand phasers at each other, and then blast the fuck out of Ivan.
Yay!
Wait, no! Oh shit! All of the dead drones are ticking timers! Bombs! But everybody's evacuated, right? No! Pepper is still there! Thusly, Tony runs off to go rescue her, just in time, and they fly off onto a rooftop in a grand, orgiastic cacophony of shit blowing up like woah in the background like a big blowing up thing. Remember how Star Wars had those three prequels you could barely see through the literal gallons of George Lucas's jizz? This is kind of like that. Except I mean, I think everybody who goes to see superhero action movies likes a bit of blowing shit up, plus, I mean, again: AC/DC is the zeitgeist, if you do not like blowing shit up, GET THE FUCK OUT OF THE THEATER.
If you were watching Iron Man 2 for the romantic payoff (seriously? really? why? you know there's probably like a Nicholas Sparks movie or 26 you could see like, down the hall, right?) this is when Tony and Pepper babble at each other until their bodies are like, "Oh my God, shut UP already," and they kiss. It's sweet, and thank God, rapidly interrupted by them realizing that Rhodey is watching them on the roof, smirking. It's good for us all. Meanwhile, shit is still blowing up in the background.
The closing moments of the movie involve Nick Fury informing Tony in a concrete room...somewhere that Natalie Romanoff's report on him indicates he's not a good candidate for joining SHIELD because he's batshit and narcissistic. Tony admits this is true -- but, SHIELD will accept him as a consultant.
THE END.
In case you're wondering about the nugget at the end of the credits? I'm keeping my lips sealed. I've spoiled the rest of the movie, you have to have something to drag you to the theater, right?