[After the “noted” “success” of our LOST rewatch two years ago, James and Scott are back to prepare for the release of Avengers: Age of Ultron the only way they know how: by going through the entire Marvel Cinematic Universe, movie by movie. We are not very imaginative. Check in every week as we go into way too much detail about pop entertainment and frequently say people are wrong about things.]

James: What’s up, Eastern Homie?

Scott: Not much, Western Omelette!

James: Whatcha up to? Killing time until The Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt hits Netflix?

Scott: In a way, isn’t that what all of life has been?

James: In… a way. BUT! Should we get down to business?

Scott: I suppose we ought to!

James: Last time, we talked about probably the most disappointing instalment in the MCU, THE INCREDIBLE HULK, and this time, we’re going to rewatch and recap what people always talk about as being really awful: IRON MAN 2.

Scott: I remembered being mildly disappointed with this movie at the time: I wasn’t that into the plot, and I found all the seeding of the AVENGERS material very distracting, but the good news is that with the benefit of time my appreciation for this movie has increased immensely! In fact it’s generally less problematic and thus in some ways better than its predecessor!

James: I actually think, after rewatching it again, it’s comparable to the first IRON MAN; it just didn’t come first, is all. It fixes a lot of the problems you and I brought up when talking about the first movie. It’s got some fun action. And the humour is EXACTLY the same. It just couldn’t live up to expectations. Also, it has Sam Rockwell dancing.

Scott: Exactly. It doesn’t have the thrill of the newness, but it has a very tight plot, some good suspense, and some really good moments of humour. Nothing that quite matches the highest points of IM1 for me, but close.

James: Yeah, it’s biggest problem might be that because it didn’t come first, and it doesn’t escalate things in a really obvious way, that it’s just not quite as memorable. I watched it a few days ago and I honestly just had to look up what happened to Ivan Vanko at the end of it. But let’s be real: it was NEVER going to blow people away like the first one did, because the first one had no expectations. It had NEGATIVE expectations.

Scott: Which is a good place to begin, because we open with Ivan Vanko - Mickey Rourke in the post-The Wrestler high point of his career - watching Tony Stark’s big “I am Iron Man” press conference from the previous movie’s conclusion, while his dad on his deathbed proclaims in Russian, “That should have been you!”

James: The scene with the two Vankos is kinda clicheed, but it’s kinda fun, too. It’s just barely the right side of kitschy. It hops to the other side of the line when Anton dies and Vanko screams, but, well, it’s over quickly.

Scott: The best part about it is Vanko’s bird. It comes up a couple times throughout the movie and it means nothing, but it’s memorable. And if there had been one similarly quirky bad guy in the Incredible Hulk we might’ve liked it a bit more.

James: Yeah, the bird is cute. There’s also a GREAT part of the scene where Ivan builds his own arc reactor in his dingy little hole of an apartment.

Scott: The opening montage is not the best bit of filmmaking that Jon Favreau has done, but it does efficiently establish Vanko as Stark’s unknown enemy - holding a grudge for his entire life against a man who has no idea he exists. which is a pretty good premise, if again a little kitchy, especially given Rourke’s steely faux-Russian performance.

James: We don’t know a lot about Ivan and Anton’s past at this point, but it tells us something very clearly: this is a man who is Tony’s match. What Tony made in a cave with a box of scraps, Ivan can make in a hole in the wall in Russia with whatever he can scrounge up.

Scott: Meanwhile, our man Tony is out tooling around in style at his own World Fair-type Expo and doing a routine with Rockettes while AC/DC blares from his suit’s built-in sound system.

James: One AMAZING little detail about Tony’s in-suit flying arrival to the Stark Expo is that one of the fireworks hits him as he’s flying in. I laugh every time I see it

Scott: I noticed that! It’s the little things.

James: It’s one of those things that Jon Favreau still does really well in this movie, which makes it so weird that this movie’s bad reputation basically got him off the franchise after its release.

Scott: Oh, I thought it was his desire to do some smaller material.

James: Well, he went from this to COWBOYS AND ALIENS…

Scott: Yeah! Smaller and personal!

James: But the firework shot, as well as Tony’s entire opening monologue, could have been straight out of the first movie, it’s so on-point.

Scott: So at the Stark Expo, Tony shows some archival footage of his dad, Mad Men’s John Slattery, who gives a feel-good monologue about his hopes for the future. But not before Tony brags that he has brought about the “longest uninterrupted period of peace” in world history, which is pretty impressive!

James: It’s a nice bit of context, considering how much he murdered people in the first one; it’s smart to focus on some genuine good that he’s doing simply by existing, though obviously that’s not a universally shared opinion, because otherwise this movie would be really boring.

Scott: We’ll get more info on that in the following scene, but I’m also very interested in the Howard Stark stuff, because instead of just being background colour, it comes back in a really plot-meaningful way.

James: Yeah, it’s seeded well, though I’m actually surprised that a different person played Howard Stark here than in CAPTAIN AMERICA, since the two were only a few years apart. But it’s meaningful as well as charming, which is par for the course here.

But we go straight from that to another great scene, where Tony is called to testify before Congress about his Iron Man suit. Garry Shandling’s Senator Stern has it out for Tony, and his competitor, Sam Rockwell’s Justin Hammer, is clearly pissed that peace is bad for business and he can’t complete with Tony’s tech.

Scott: Sam Rockwell - I wouldn’t stay he steals the show or anything, because his character is rather understated next to Rourke - but he was really the MVP of this for me.

James: Oh, for me he steals the show completely. I’m actually not a big fan of Rourke in this movie, though it’s not that he’s bad or anything. It’s just that Ivan Vanko is such a Mickey Rourke role, you know? You kind of expect him to have gold on his teeth and some weird tattoos and an accent at this point. Rockwell is just charming, funny and understated.

Scott: Like, he doesn’t get to eat the scenery, but he has this quiet smarm of completely unearned cockiness, like the Anti-Stark. Justin Hammer is such a wiener and you want him to LOSE.

James: I really like how Hammer, like the other IRON MAN movie villains, is a great counterpoint to Tony. Obie is basically who Tony USED to be, Vanko is who he might have been with a less privileged background, and Hammer is who he’d be if he was a complete tool without the talent. We see that in this scene, where Hammer gives a hilarious speech about how peace isn’t sustainable and “this ain’t Canada,” using footage of other nations’ Iron Man experiments to try to prove his point. But Tony hacks into the system and shows the rest of the footage: not only are these other countries’ technology not at all successful, they’re actually Hammer Industries tech. A great throughline in the movie is that Hammer’s shit doesn’t work.

James: A great throughline in the movie is that Hammer’s shit doesn’t work.

Scott: “I’d like to note for the record, the man inside that suit survived!”

James: A++ line delivery from Rockwell there. He’s the only other man in the entire series who can verbally spar with Tony convincingly, in a way that mimics Tony’s own charm. The only other person who can do that is Pepper.

Scott: The Senate hearing is a great scene: it downloads a lot of information about where the world is now, what we’re meant to think of it including a fairly nuanced opinion delivered by the NEW James Rhodes, Don Cheadle. Plus it sets up Hammer’s dealings, which he had passed off as being developed by those enemy countries.

We also passed two noteworthy things: Tony still doesn’t like to be handed things, and there is something “up” with his blood! Only the second is a plot point.

James: Something something blood toxicity, I’m sure it doesn’t mean anythi-aaaaaaand, take it away with the explanation, Jarvis. Basically, the palladium that Tony built his arc reactor out of is actually poisoning him, and he’s… uh… gonna have to deal with that.

Scott: Set to the tune of the Clash’s “Should I Stay Or Should I Go,” we get a nice expositional scene from everyone ‘s favourite self-aware house/future Vision, letting us know what “the deal is” with palladium and blood toxicity. It makes for as much of an adversary in this movie as Vanko or Hammer.

James: Delivered by Paul Bettany in the most hilariously on-the-nose line imaginable, “Unfortunately, the device that is keeping you alive is also killing you.”

Scott: DID THE SLOW KIDS IN THE BACK GET THAT

But as a plot element, I didn’t mind it. It gave Tony something to do between Vanko fights.

James: It’s an intellectual challenge, where the Vanko fight ends up being a different kind of symbolism, more centred around friendship. And I know some people hated it, but the way Tony figures out the solution to the blood toxicity challenge later on in the movie made me smile.

Scott: Tony, aware of his faulty health, promotes Pepper to CEO in a scene constructed entirely out of pretty sharp banter.

James: And a nice bit of doublespeak when he tells her, “It’s you. It’s always been you.” We talked about it last week, and we’ll talk about it again, but the Tony/Pepper relationship is consistently a high point in the entire series, including AVENGERS.

Scott: With Potts promoted, Tony looks to hire a new right-hand woman, and settles for some rando from the legal department after knowing her for eight seconds, on the basis that she looks like Scarlett Johansson. And can take Happy down with a headscissor.

James: It’s a funny scene, because Tony’s a chauvinist about it but it’s actually played like he’s being a creep, and his partner in creepdom, Happy, gets straight-up beat down. And really, that’s kind of how I assume Tony would hire people anyway.

Scott: I have to believe that SHIELD, knowing this, planted those “Japanese modelling photos” in her cover story.

James: It’s a scene that would be more uncomfortable if it wasn’t played right, and I think it’s played a LITTLE better here than similar scenes were in the first movie.

But the movie moves briskly on to its first action set piece, where Tony, Pepper and “Natalie” take a trip to the Monaco Grand Prix, or at least the off-brand version of it because Marvel didn’t want to pay for the Formula 1 license, which probably would have legit been prohibitively expensive.

Scott: It’s a pretty good place for the confrontation: weirdly public and definitely a showcase for Stark’s ego. I kinda wish the car turned out to be a suit, but the briefcase was cool as well.

James: A couple of important things happen here: first, Hammer looks like a schmuck again. And second, the part you mentioned, where Tony is feeling the tug of mortality and decides to drive his own race car, but is attacked by Vanko and his arc reactor whips. And yeah, about all you can say here is that it’s cool, but it really is a super great-looking scene. It was the key part of the trailers, I believe. Like, this scene was actually the literal selling point of the movie.

Scott: Yeah, the scene of Vanko unveilling his whips was THE moment for the trailer. He’s kind of an interesting villain: he has a version of the Arc Reactor, but since he can’t build a suit, he builds these crazy whips that mark him instantly as a Comic Book Supervillain. And that’s a crazy ostentatious and impractical weapon, but as I said with IM1, the movies don’t really shy away from being comic booky: there’s no commentary on how weird it is, they just go with it.

James: It’s comic book-y in a great way, too: it’s a literalization of the relationship between these two men, where Vanko hates Tony so much that he has turned Tony’s greatest achievement into a weapon, and one designed to cut through HIM. Like, that is just kinda perfect. If these movies are going to capture anything about the comics, I’m glad it’s the oversized action set piece metaphors.

Scott: Once Ivan is arrested for plotting an elaborate, inefficient assassination on a public figure at a public event, Tony is kind enough to visit him in jail and give him some tips on how his murdervest could have been improved, and they actually have some pretty good dialogue. I would say better than average “hero confers with villain” dialogue. Where Ivan makes explicit the content of the montage: that he’s out to get Stark for taking the legacy he could have had, and to avenge what became of his father.

James: I like that Vanko is the first person to pick up on the fact that Tony is dying, and that all he wanted to do was show that Tony was fallible; Tony, meanwhile, respects Ivan enough to compliment his tech and suggest an improvement, but is arrogant enough that he doesn’t think of a way that this could come back to haunt him.

Scott: Well of course, Vanko is safely behind bars, there’s absolutely no way he could pursue any kind of revenge now. Like, the movie is just another hour of Tony and Rhodey going for drinks!

James: Tony spending three hours cooking Pepper an omelet on his plane and suggesting they run away together.

Scott: That was a pretty great scene.

James: That, “Did you just make this?” “Where do you think I’ve been for three hours?” exchange is great. And it’s a good example of Tony being vulnerable, in his own guarded way. He’s TRYING to tell Pepper that something is wrong, and that he’s depressed, but it comes out all Tony-like and she thinks his suggestion they go on vacation is just him being a dilettante as usual.

Scott: Again, this series just gets Tony so RIGHT. It’s one thing to write zippy dialogue, sure, but to be able to use it to convey that level of emotional maturity and nuance? Dang, guy!

James: AND Hammer. The next sequence, where he breaks Ivan out of prison and Ivan shows his hypocrisy by declaring the Starks to be “thieves and butchers” and then snapping an innocent dude’s neck, is funny (the scared look on the face of the inmate who’s going to be Ivan’s corpse double) and effective (Ivan’s hypocrisy). Plus, it gives us another scene of Sam Rockwell being absolutely fucking incredible as Justin Hammer, trying to glitz and glam Ivan into being impressed. “I had this [ice cream] flown in from San Francisco. It’s Italian, though.”

Rockwell as a showman who’s deeply jealous of Tony, Vanko’s raised eyebrow when Hammer says they’re similar, the seeds of discontent being sewn between the two allies… it’s kinda a perfect scene.

Scott: Absolutely. Hammer is so pitch-perfect sleazy. Vanko’s there too.

James: My legit favourite part of the movie is that Hammer doesn’t die, and so he can still return later. Unfortunately, the next scene is my actual least favourite in the movie. It starts off strong, with Rhodey walking up to Tony at his birthday party and asking what’s up, because he’s been doing some weird lone gunslinger shit and he’s worried, that devolves into one-liners and mecha-punches while DJ AM (see you at the crossroads, homie) plays a mashup.

Scott: Yeah, I remember this was where the movie lost me the first time. I didn’t think it was funny, but it was clearly meant to be, and it took some of the heavier themes a bit too lightly.

James: It features Rhodey yelling at Tony, “You don’t deserve to wear that suit!” It’s rough stuff.

“You wanna be the War Machine, take your shot!”

Scott: For those of you playing codename bingo at home…

James: The card will go sadly unfilled this go-around, because Ivan is never actually called Whiplash.

Scott: I did like “The Gallagher,” I’ll admit, but that’s it about this scene. It was the standard-issue buddy comedy blowup comma necessary fight scene in the middle of the movie.

James: It’s just a weird scene that feels like a misfire; it’s not funny, the fight between best friends goes from zero to a hundred in no time flat (THERE’S your whiplash!) and the only important part is that Rhodey takes the proto-War Machine suit.

It also sets up a fun visual of hungover Tony eating a doughnut in a giant fake doughnut as Nick Fury is exasperated in his general direction.

Scott: Here is where the movie goes into AVENGERS PREQUEL mode for a bit, although now that we’ve been through the first AVENGERS movie and seen where it all winds up, the shift doesn’t jar me. It makes sense that they’d want to lay a solid groundwork in the movie they knew a lot of people where going to see. We also get a semi-official rejection of the pre-credits scene of INCREDIBLE HULK, where Stark is now officially uninterested in joining Fury’s “boy band.”

James: Even if at the end of the movie he makes it sound like he DID want to be a part of it! It’s a little sloppy, but overall, it works. I guess you can just say, “Tony’s being a jerk to Fury,” because that makes total sense with every other scene they share, ever.

Scott: True!

James: We also get the reveal that “Natalie” is Natasha Romanov, and they give Tony a little elixir to abate his palladium poisoning symptoms, though he’s still gonna need to deal with that later. The scene is a tad perfunctory, but it’s not egregiously so, like the scene before it. It’s a little fun, pretty quippy. Standard MCU stuff.

Scott: Between scenes of Fury dictating the plot to Tony, we check in with Vanko and he’s building… something! Something that doesn’t require a person inside. “Drone better, bro.” Okay, he doesn’t say “bro.”

James: Wait, he doesn’t?

Scott: Amazingly not!

James: Huh.

Scott: Well, now you’ve got me doubting, but I was listening for it.

James: Hawkguy has really gotten to me.

The Vanko/Hammer scene is slight, but it shows that Ivan’s a lot like Tony: he knows he’s too good for this shit, and that he’s gonna do his own thing. And it highlights how UNLIKE Tony Hammer really is, because he’s all quips and no smarts.

Scott: He gets a fair bit huffy when he doesn’tget his way: he doesn’t have what it takes to take control of the situation the way he wants to. That’s kind of what makes him a compelling villain: he’s a failure of a human but with the capacity to do a lot of damage.

James: He’s kind of like a toddler with money. It’s charming but also scary, because he is gonna do something dumb and ruin some couple’s life.

Scott: He’s the only Marvel villain with an inferiority complex, unless you count Tim Roth’s insecurity about his Hulk-fighting abilities.

James: I don’t, because Blonsky talks about how he’s so smart and great, and if he could just put that in his younger body, he’d be unstoppable. Blonsky’s all ego, for real. Hammer’s is a sham.

Scott: For real.

Meanwhile, back at Exposition HQ, Fury explains what “the deal” is with Howard Stark and Anton Vanko, how they were working on something that would have set off an “energy arms race.”

James: Nick lets Tony know he doesn’t have to worry about his dad maybe not being great, because Vanko’s dad DID help come up with an early version of the arc reactor, but he was a bloodthirsty megalomaniac and Howard was a patriot, and that the Stark legacy was noble after all. (Besides the arms dealing.)

Scott: Yeah, they can’t forget that.

James: But the series so far has played cool with how close Tony and his dad actually were; in the first movie, Tony’s talk about his dad retrospectively feels like a bit of desperate bluster, and this movie frames the relationship as being pretty cold, and it depresses Tony. Eventually, he watches the old Stark Expo commerical b-roll that Fury gives him, and gets a bit of a heartwarming speech from his dad, leaving a message for his son in the future, when maybe he’ll be able to solve the “problem” of the arc reactor.

Scott: Following Tony being confined to his house under the watchful eye of Agent Phil, and immediately escaping, Tony goes to see Pepper in yet another great scene between the two of them in which he misremembers the connection between her and strawberries. At which point he stumbles across the old model of Stark Village and Beautiful-Minds his way to a solution for the toxic blood problem! Turns out all he had to do was invent an element in a scene that is probably impossible but cool as hell.

James: It’s a nice little bit of tight screenwriting after a couple of dodgy scenes; Tony is basically kept under secret house arrest by SHIELD, and when he shows up to talk with Pepper, she is EXTREMELY pissed that he hasn’t contacted her during all the ridiculous fallout from his birthday party. The movie inhabits her POV there really well, where even when we KNOW Tony’s whole deal and we know it wasn’t really his fault, he still looks like a dick and we one hundred percent agree with icy, pissed-off, power move Pepper. The series does right by Pepper in a big way overall, but the fact that she’s such a serious, competent CEO who doesn’t take shit even from her sexy, brilliant love interest is nice. It lets her have her own point of view, and be rational, and not just be a nag or a shrew or whatever other movies might turn her into. She might be higher-strung than Tony is in general, but she’s rarely actually wrong, if ever.

Scott: Elsewhere, Justin Hammer unveils his OTHER plan, to hot glue a bunch of guns onto the sorta-War-Machiney armour. I’ve always loved that run where Hammer lists off the various guns he’s selling, culminating in the most obvious joke setup that I completely failed to see coming the first time, the Ex-Wife.

James: It’s such a stupid joke that is built up to so perfectly, and it matches the character. Justin Hammer’s sales pitch is A+++.

Scott: Vanko also calls Stark to let him know he’s a) alive and b) totally his nemesis. Which is a point at which I realize that a huge chunk of this movie has passed and Tony hasn’t thought he was fighting anybody! Which is probably why the Rhodey fight was so dumb.

James: Tony was fighting HIMSELF, Scott. It’s a metaphor.

Scott: That can’t be right, he never punches himself.

James: He punches himself with too many drinks.

Scott: Oh, so THAT’S what symbolism is like.

James: I actually really do love that aspect of the movie, though; I like that it’s more about Tony growing up than it is him actually fighting people. And even the villains are representations of himself and his own immaturity. The first movie was nothing BUT him killing dudes, and in this one he actually doesn’t kill anyone!

Scott: Just a poor innocent watermelon.

James: Even though it takes a long time for the different plots to come together and for Tony and Vanko to actually BE nemeses, you always know who Tony’s enemies are. Justin Theroux’s script is a little uneven, which is one reason why I think people dislike the movie, but overall it hits the marks it needs to.

Scott: I totally forgot this movie was written by THE LEFTOVERS’ Justin Theroux back before he ever met Jennifer Aniston.

After stealing Vanko’s shoes and bird, Hammer makes his big presentation at Stark Expo, recalling Vanko’s scheme to embarrass him on his own turf. And it goes… smoothly?

James: The Vanko/Hammer relationship is my second-favourite one in the movie, after Tony/Pepper. Hammer wants to be the big dog and threaten Vanko, but he’s so out of his depth and ultimately at Vanko’s whim completely. Hammer can bitch and scream about an imaginary contract (strained agreements over ice cream don’t count, dogg!) all he wants, but he can’t do anything without Vanko, and Vanko knows it. He just OOZES contempt for Hammer, and it shows when he refuses to do anything Hammer tells him and ultimately just says, “Here, have some drones, they can salute, work with it.”

Scott: My fave is when Vanko throws Hammer’s words back at him “Hey, don’t get so attached to things.”

James: Ivan’s a dude who hangs some private security thugs off-screen and makes a phonecall with them dangling behind him. What’s Hammer going to do to him? So Hammer tries to salvage his ego by giving his keynote presentation at Stark Expo, and it is just so adorably dorky I can’t even stand it. He dances out to some uncool music and makes jokes nobody laughs at. Compare that to Tony’s keynote at the beginning of the movie, where he flies in in front of dancing Iron Man cheerleaders and kicks it over to his dead dad. The movie’s played at how Hammer wants to BE Tony to date, and this is the scene where they really tip the hand that it’s just a pipe dream. He ALMOST pulls it off, too. Unveiling the four different branches of armed forces mechadrones is pretty neat, and then RHODEY walks in.

Scott: Hammer’s plan to make his company into the NEW Stark Industries was this close to working… if not for the fact that he had partnered with an insane Russian mad scientist hell bent on destroying Stark with an army of robots.

James: Tony has, as you mentioned, realized that the entire Stark Expo campus is designed as the model of a heretofore undiscovered artificial element, and that his dad’s last message to him was instructing him to fix clean energy by inventing the new element, which he does. It’s hokey, but really cool-looking and fun, and I really dig it, even though I know for a fact that’s when a ton of people flat-out gave up on the movie. But look back at our INCREDIBLE HULK rewatch: we love the corny shit. Plus, it leads to Tony putting the arc reactor core made from his new element into his chest and exclaiming, “That tastes like coconut! And metal! YEAAAAH!”

And with that, he’s off to the Stark Expo, where he’s traced Vance’s call and goes to interrupt Hammer’s keynote. And… things go well?

Scott: Uh oh, turns out the revenge-driven Russian criminal has planned a double cross and not only programmed the drones to KILL STARK, but also hijacked the Warm Sheen’s suit with Rhodey inside!

James: A quick shout out to Don Cheadle, who is legitimately great as a befuddled stick-in-the-mud James Rhodes

Scott: I actually do think he does a better job at that than Terrence Howard would have.

Which leads to the first part of the movie’s climactic battle, where Tony leads the drones on a chase around New York to thin out their numbers while Happy Hogan rushes to shut down Vanko at his base of operations! Also the Black Widow is there to help.

James: Howard was a good Rhodey for the first movie, but Cheadle plays a great counterpoint to Tony. Plus, as we’ll see in IRON MAN 3, he rocks a fantastic green polo shirt.

It’s a lot like the Tony and Iron Monger fight from the first movie, where Tony saves civilians and shows that he’s a hero.

Scott: For real though, when Scarlett finally gets to get in on the action, it’s really cool, and Hogan’s “I got him!” line is one of the best laughs in the movie. Black Widow’s fighting style is very cinematic, flashy and “no-wasted-moves” efficient.

James: It’s GREAT. It shows off Natasha as a capable hero, and in retrospect is a great prelude to her fight at the beginning of AVENGERS. Plus, I was actually shocked that considering the movie made a point of showing lingerie photos of her earlier, the camera doesn’t sexualize or linger on her at ALL. It’s good action direction.

Scott: They restore control to Rhodey in just the nick of time as the drones corner Tony and Rhodey in the biosphere, leading to some really great banter about tactics. “You HAVE a big gun, that doesn’t mean you ARE the big gun.” The way Downey and Cheadle banter at the end of this thing makes me wish they had more scenes throughout.

James: It pleases me to no end that a movie all about mechs-slash-Gundams features a fight in a biosphere with cherry blossoms blowing in the breeze.

And yeah, Downey and Cheadle make a great comic pair, so it’s surprising that they got such little time together elsewhere. I’ve complimented the script a lot so far, but that’s one way that it DOES slip a little; a scene earlier like the airplane or Funvee line in IRON MAN would have helped this movie even out just a smidgen more.

Scott: Yeah. The movie’s fine, and there certainly are more nice touches than in INCREDIBLE HULK, but there feels like a few places it could have been positively tweaked.

James: But Tony and Rhodey take care of the drones, only for Vanko to arrive in his own Whiplash armoured suit, and a pretty neat fight scene ensues; it’s a good step up from the fight at the race earlier.

Scott: So Tony and Rhodey have to beat the rest of the drones, which they do with the use of a cutter beam that Tony has NEVER EVER mentioned before, and you know what, I’m cool with that for some reason, because if they had shown him trying it out it would have been too obvious, too “Chekhov-y.” And for whatever reason it’s a one-time use cartridge, which is why he can’t use it on Vanko.

James: It’s just well explained enough that it works. And, plus, we JUST saw Tony get a hardware upgrade, so it makes sense he’d debut a new power. That’s just how these things work, comics and movies alike.

Scott: It’s nice to hold back some surprises for the end.

Vanko has built himself - am I reading this right? - a giant metal suit. But with whips! You gotta stick with your gimmick, of course.

James: And like I said, it’s a good step up from the earlier fight, where he just strapped some arc reactors to his chest. As he says to Tony, he listened to Tony’s suggestions and made some adjustments.

Scott: Yeah, it really is a good fight scene, suitably climactic.

James: It feels like enough of a step up from before that it actually feels “big,” and it’s

different enough from the Iron Monger fight in the first movie that it’s not just a rehash. Some good lines from Tony and Rhodey’s team-up:

-calling the drones “Hammeroids”

-“Subtle, all the bells and whistles.” “It’s called being a badass.”

-“It’s called the kill box, Tony. This is where you go to die.”

Meanwhile, Pepper is just running CIRCLES around Hammer as he sputters about how none of this would have happened if “her” guy hadn’t shown up,” and is such a putz that he doesn’t even get a fight scene; cops just show up and haul him off like the second-rate white collar criminal he is.

Scott: I love Hammer. He’s the mastermind without being the mastermind, the villain who can’t even throw a punch.

James: Hammer gets this great moment where he’s being carted off and he tries to turn Pepper’s actions against her by shouting about how she’s “pinning it on [him]” “like a CEO,” which is just perfect. Because she IS acting like a CEO. She sees a problem, she takes care of it, and nobody gets harmed. It actually showcases how capable she is.

Scott: Once Vanko is defeated he has one final trick to play: all of the drones and his very suit are BOMBS! Which seems obvious come to think of it.

James: But before that, Tony and Rhodey win the fight with a buddy team-up anime move, which I 100% love. And yeah, the bomb thing makes complete sense; he’s enough of a nihilist that it makes sense that he wouldn’t plan on living through a loss, and, well, if you’re gonna make an army of unmanned drones, why WOULDN’T you put bombs in them as a failsafe? That’s just good planning.

Scott: Plus it keeps the movie from making Tony kill Vanko himself.

James: It’s worth mentioning again: my (and possibly your) biggest problem with IRON MAN was that it was all about Tony realizing that murder is bad and then murdering a shit ton of people anyway. IRON MAN 2, even though it’s a little more uneven and not quite as tightly scripted, gets one thing right: the hero doesn’t kill anyone, and it shows him rescuing civilians, too, whether it’s Expo-goers, a kid in an officially-licensed Iron Man mask, still available at Toys-R-Us, or Pepper herself. This movie actually sells the idea that Tony is committed to peace more than any other appearance of his in the MCU does.

Scott: I loved that kid in the Officially Licensed Iron Man Mask.

James: It’s another so-dorky-it’s-kinda-great detail. It’s objectively terrible but it works.

Scott: I’m not always as vocal about it because I know filmmakers are obsessed with the closure that comes with killing the bad guy, but you’re right that in IRON MAN, Tony has a pretty clear crisis of conscience about what his tech does to the world. It sends mixed messages when his solution is “Oh but I’m gonna kill the guys who are using my stuff to kill.” Mixed messages of course being the nice way of putting “what the fuck though”

James: Actually, one reason why fans might have been disappointed with IRON MAN might have been because it didn’t play to those conventions of the genre regarding how to deal with villains at the end. But regardless, Tony saves Pepper, they finish resolving their differences (he admitted his near-death to her right before the big fight scene blew up) and kiss, much to Rhodey’s bemusement.

Scott: He was on that roof first!

James: “I think it was weird. You guys look like two seals fighting over a grape.” I liked Terence Howard as Rhodey and said as much in the first rewatch, but I can’t see him delivering that line.

Scott: I was JUST typing that.

James: So with the villains dealt with, friendship re-established and makeouts finally achieved, the movie ends! Also Senator Stern gives Tony a medal but still calls him a “little prick”

Scott: The film begins to wrap up with Fury delivering his analysis of Stark’s prospects for joining the potential Avengers: the Iron Man suit yay, the man inside meh. Which is rude, considering he just saved everyone and invented a new element. In his garage, with a BOX OF SCRAPS

James: Kinda a dick move tbh

It’s a little better than the Fury scene at the end of INCREDIBLE HULK in that it MOSTLY makes sense - Tony IS a dick, and he didn’t respect Natasha, his handler - but it’s still a little weird.

Scott: Tony still does have a ways to go - as much as he had personal growth, it’s not like he became a perfect person as far as his psychological profile goes - but still that’s no reason to keep him off your Avengers team. He IS Iron Man! It’ll take two more movies before they actually agree on that.

James: Considering the moral of the movie is literally “Only Tony can do all this”

Scott: “Tony’s good, Rhodey’s all right, Hammer sucks and Vanko is evil.” As for Gary Shandling, well we later find out he was evil all along, but that’s not for several weeks yet! So, spoiler alert! Gary Shandling is evil.

James: ALSO the post-credits scene teases THOR, whatevs

James: Final thoughts? Did your opinion of IRON MAN 2 change at all with the rewatch?

Scott: It did! As much as it lacks the freshness and yeah, some of the comedy of the first one, it definitley has plenty of charm, especially coming after the dull INCREDIBLE HULK. I really appreciated Sam Rockwell in this - Rourke was flashier, and pretty big at the time, but Rockwell had more to do and better scenes. The AVENGERS-building stuff doesn’t seem as distracting or garish as it did before we actually had an AVENGERS movie. All in all, it’s actually a fairly well-plotted movie that stands on its own despite briefly losing track of itself in the middle with a tacked-on and unappealing buddy fight scene.

You pointed out that the bad guys were all reflections of Stark himself, and in general I prefer that the movie stuck to the superhero-y “personal nemesis” angle as opposed to real-world problem solving which is never as satisfying as it seems in concept. (As with the Afghanistan stuff in IRON MAN.)

James: Rockwell was the secret best part of this movie; I think he’s the only villain in the series so far that can REALLY go up against Downey. I mean, Hammer is a yutz, but Rockwell makes it work. It’s a killer performance.

Rewatching the movie really drove home my overall impression of it, namely that I was right all along. It’s not IRON MAN, but it’s not the massive drop-off in quality that people claim it is. It’s EASILY comparable to its predecessor, and actually fixes a big problem that movie had. It just didn’t come first, and the script was slightly, SLIGHTLY less tight. But it’s still charming, well-cast and well-directed, so, I dunno what to say here. Hahaha, just kidding, I know what to say here. I was right, suckers.

Scott: And really, what C!TB Rewatch would be complete without a chance to saythat?

James: That was like the final third of Rewatch! The Lost.

Scott: I think with INCHULK, they got a good look at what kind of movie they didn’t want to make, and were able to double-down on the charm of their cast and the tone that Jon Favreau executed with the first IRON MAN. The rest of the movies have all followed suit in one way or another. As good as this movie is, they mostly get even better from here! Certainly as far as solo movies go…

James: Oh, I’m going to get annoying talking about how much I like the THOR movies. But that’s for another week!

Scott: Next week, in fact, when we catch up with Agent Phil as he chases The Blue down in Albuquerque! That’s why he’s there, right? Heisenberg?

James: smdh