I went and saw Iron Man 2 last night, being Sunday night, at the local theatre with my family. The place was nearly empty, but of course you still have to stand in line for popcorn. I think half the people there are just shills trying to make it seem like popcorn is this big fucking deal. You see these guys and think, “Wow, if everyone else is paying $13 for stale popcorn, I should too!” The same concept applies to any and all Starbucks.
We were the only ones in the screening room for the 9:30 showing, but for some reason, after looking at my ticket, I noticed the seller had given me tickets to the later 10:00 showing, in Digital. We shrugged and decided to stay. It’s not every day you have a whole auditorium to yourself. You can laugh as loud as you want and at inappropriate times, you can crinkle your candy wrappers loudly, leave your cell phone on, and make as many wise-ass comments as you like and THERE’S NO ONE THERE TO MAKE BITCHY REMARKS ABOUT YOUR BEHAVIOUR. Heaven is probably a lot like that, only they bring the popcorn to you, and give you free refills. It’s like watching TV at home only you’re outside in the real world. I was half-expecting some lardass to come in and plop down next to me despite there being eighty other empty seats, and he would of course have to budge past me with his polyester sweat pants in my face instead of taking the other route. This didn’t happen.
Long before the movie was released, I heard rumour about Mickey Rourke trying to get bird into movie to be his character’s drinking buddy. I thought about how bad that idea must seem to any director, and assumed it would never make the final print. But that bird is in like 10% of the movie. It was a pretty easy role for Mickey. All he had to do was act like a prick and pick up a paycheque, but he went a little farther, giving the character two sides. On one side he’s this fallen brilliant scientist wracked with grief over his father’s death, and on the other he’s this ex-con who thinks it’s a good idea to walk onto the race track in Monte Carlo with electro-whips. Somehow, it gets from A to B, and you just accept it.
I thought this movie would delve into Tony Stark’s alcoholism, and despite having four good friends around watching him with a drink glued to his hand like Ricky from the Trailer Park Boys, no one comes out and says, “You’re an alcoholic!” Which kept it clean for the kids. I thought the was a few times I’d have to use the earmuffs on my step-son, but phrases like, “Drop your socks and grab your…” ended with, “kroks.”
Tony does get blind, stinking drunk at a party, with D.J. A.M., and I was like, “Whoa, that’s D.J. A.M.! I only know about him because he died!” Which is true. Sadly, as he danced around in the Iron Man suit, he did not do the Robot. I think it would be one the suit’s pre-programmed responses, right next to tea-bagging.
A lot of the movie builds up to The Avengers movie, coming sometime in the unforseeable future. There’s a lot of scenes with Tony and Nick Fury talking business, a half-made Captain America shield, and Thor supposedly makes a cameo at the end of the credits, but I didn’t stay that long. They’ve been leading to The Avengers since the first Iron Man and the second Hulk reboot, and if Robert Downey Jr. wasn’t on board it’d probably be a total disappointment.
Iron Man’s weird in that he doesn’t have any good, or recognizable bad-guys to fight, but somehow the movies are better than Spider-Man, where he’s fighting three villains at once. It’s a lot like Spider-Man 2 in a way, in that both movies are about super-heroes overcoming illness and a loss of their powers while everyone around them suddenly decides they hate them. Plus: red-heads.
At this point I’m fairly certain he’ll never fight the Mandarin, which is something we can all be thankful for. In the two TV animated cartoons he’s had, every episode has been about Iron Man fighting the incredibly racist stereo-type that is the Mandarin. It’s like how He-Man fought Skeletor every episode, only with a Fu-Man-Chu. Hammer looks like he’s been set up to be the bad guy in the third Iron Man, plus some anonymous second-stringer, like… I can’t name any Iron Man villains, and I’ve read like fifty Iron Man comics, in which he fights villains. I think there’s a dude with cold powers, a chick, another dude, and then some robot suit dude. Interesting side-note: you don’t want to be a ice-using villain coming onto the scene today. Every ice-related name has been used: Ice Man, Killer Frost, Mr.Freeze, Blizzard, Captain Cold, Ice-T. The worst? Icicle, sometimes spelt Ici-kill.
The film in the theatre began flickering, and the projectionist came in and told us we’d be better off going down the hall to the Digital version of the movie, which was fifteen minutes behind our showing. After moving over, I couldn’t tell what was so great about the Digital version. It looked only a little crisper, but the screen was smaller, and the audio was quieter. The transition from screen to screen was like an Intermission, without the ol’-timey placard and bad music. Monty Python and the Holy Grail is the only movie I can think of with this insert still in it in our modern Digital Age.
All in all, I’d say Iron Man really lives up to the original. Don Cheadle’s War Machine even apologizes for not being the same black guy from the first movie when he first appears. Ever notice how white most super hero movies are? The only black guys you see are usually street thugs. Was there even one black guy in all five Superman movies that wasn’t Richard Pyror, or a pimp with one line? Iron Man has two black dudes, both of whom are super heroes, even though one of them is white in the comics. They didn’t even need a black guy, and they put Samuel L. Jackson, because he’s so damn black.
