In Twenty 20-Fav, we’re spending 2025 examining the work of actor/director Jon Favreau. In this entry, the Marvel phenomenon officially becomes an assembly line with the production of Iron Man 2.
Iron Man 2 is only the third film from Marvel Studios, but it represents a real inflection point for everyone involved. While the promise of more Iron Man seemed like an obvious slam dunk, rushing it into theaters did nobody any favors. Iron Man 2 is easily one of the weakest entries in a franchise that currently spans 37 feature films, 25 TV series, and a bunch of random, one-off shorts. Of course, you can’t blame anyone for trying. With Iron Man a proven commodity, a sequel was a pretty safe bet, much moreso than Thor or Captain America, so it was fast-tracked into production ahead of both of those films. And if they were ever going to make The Avengers, Marvel needed a little financial security. So long story short, Iron Man 2 was made for purely financial reasons.
And boy does it show. Iron Man 2 went into production without a finished screenplay and only a vague idea of how the larger franchise business would work. The mandate from producers was ‘more of the same’, which also meant doubling down on their newly-coined Cinematic Universe. As such, a large chunk of this movie is dedicated to Nick Fury yelling at Tony Stark for not being good enough to join The Avengers, and also how he really doesn’t have time for Tony’s dumb ass because SHIELD is busy dealing with Other Things, wink wink. We’re dropping not-so-subtle hints to the other movies we’re busy making, and you’d better get excited for them. Whatever’s going on in this film clearly isn’t that important, since we’re wasting time showing you Captain America’s shield for some reason.
As Iron Man 2 opens, we find out that Iron Man has somehow achieved peace between “East and West”, whatever that means. Tony Stark (Robert Downey, Jr.) is subpoenaed to appear before Congress, so that Senator Stern (Garry Shandling) can dress him down for essentially holding the US hostage with what he (correctly) perceives as a weapon. He brings on one of Stark’s competitors, Justin Hammer (Sam Rockwell), to prove that this tech could easily fall into the wrong hands, corroborated by Col. James Rhodes (Don Cheadle, replacing Terence Howard).1
This is all in the first fifteen minutes, and absolutely none of it is exciting. When Tony shows up onstage at the Stark Expo, someone in the crowd shouts “Blow something up!” Tony just laughs this off and bumbles through his speech about peace before we’re whisked away to a Senate hearing where nothing of the sort happens.
A big reason for this is that there was no real script to build from. Favreau hired Justin Theroux to write one, knowing he’d have to update the pages on the fly during the shoot. According to the behind-the-scenes book “MCU: The Reign of Marvel Studios”2, Theroux had to constantly adapt and rework the story to whatever nonsense Downey decided to ad-lib on the set that day. It’s little wonder, then, that the story never truly comes together; just a series of plot points that they knew they needed to hit, with little rhyme or reason to connect them, because they never sat down to hammer that part out.
There are two warring storylines at play here. The first revolves around Ivan Vanko (Mickey Rourke, fresh off an Oscar nomination for The Wrestler) seeking revenge against the Starks for pushing his father out of the company way back when. He arrives on the scene in Monaco as Tony races in the Grand Prix, brandishing electro-whips built from the same blueprints as Tony’s arc reactor, proving that Stark’s tech is already out there in the real world for the taking. This convinces the government that they really oughta get a hold of one of Stark’s suits, tout de suite.
The other storyline reveals that Tony is slowly poisoning himself to death with the palladium cores he keeps using to power the doohickey in his heart. This blood poisoning reads as a metaphor for alcoholism, culminating in Stark drunkenly partying in the Iron Man suit and becoming a danger to himself and everyone around him. The ensuing fight between Stark and Rhodes over this ends with Rhodes taking one of Tony’s suits and delivering it to the US military, who in turn allow Justin Hammer to kit it out with all kinds of guns and bombs and shit, ultimately turning Rhodes into the War Machine.
Loosely adapting the general idea of the 1979 Iron Man story “Demon in a Bottle”, Tony’s drunkenness is soft-pedaled for the purposes of a PG-13 popcorn movie. It’s also a very small part of a movie that already has too many components. This entire plotline is resolved in a truly baffling string of words that I am now going to have to relate to you:
Nick Fury tells Tony he needs to invent a new element to cure himself of his palladium poisoning. Tony then watches an old film reel of his father, Howard (John Slattery), obliquely explaining to Tony from the past that “the key to the future rests here”. “Here”, as it turns out, is in the scale model of the Stark Expo that Howard is presently sitting on top of, and which Tony later finds stored in the office of Pepper Potts (Gwenyth Paltrow), whom he has recently made the CEO of Stark Industries because Tony’s too much of a lazy, distracted shit to do much bosswork around the office. Anyway, Tony is put on house arrest by Nick Fury, enforced by new special agent Natasha Romanoff (Scarlett Johansson) and returning Agent Coulson (Clark Gregg), who is only in the movie to tell us he has to leave to go to New Mexico, which is a nod to the events of Thor, coming soon to a theater near you.
After a little light remodeling, Tony successfully synthesizes a new element to power his arc reactor, which he immediately sticks in his chest and cures his metal poisoning instantly thanks to the power of movie magic. Depending on which nerd site you consult, this new element is either Vibranium (which will become very important in the MCU later down the road), or a completely new element nicknamed “Badassium”, because the people who name these things are all fucking idiots.
I’m belaboring the point here. Iron Man 2 is a meandering, smug mess of a movie that has little to no reason for existing. There are only three action sequences in the entire movie, and that’s only if you count the fistfight Tony and Rhodey while Daft Punk’s “Robot Rock” blasts over the speakers. Hammer and Vanko’s master plan is to humiliate Tony Stark in public, not realizing that a) this man is currently dealing with his own impending death and couldn’t give two shits about whatever they’re doing, but also that b) Tony Stark has never learned shame, and couldn’t be humiliated even if he showed his ass on live TV. These guys are clueless, so is the movie, and frankly I’m done thinking about all of it.
One thing I will say in the movie’s favor, though, is that I appreciate the continued use of AC/DC songs. The first film introduced us to Tony Stark with “Back in Black”, and while I still don’t think that makes a whole lot of sense, kicking off the sequel with “Shoot to Thrill” is an A+ bit of soundtracking. It fits Tony’s devil-may-care attitude perfectly, but these days it feels downright refreshing to hear any AC/DC song that isn’t “Thunderstruck” for the millionth time. In fact, AC/DC released an entire greatest hits album to act as the film’s official soundtrack, even though only two of the tracks appear in the film. They even went as far as to shoot a new music video for “Shoot to Thrill”. It’s just concert footage intercut with scenes from the movie, but still, I appreciate the effort.
Iron Man 2 suffers from simply being pushed through too quickly. Given another year or two to really get the story right, we might be having a different conversation. It all comes down to the film simply having no real reason for existing beyond delivering Marvel a big fat payday. It’s like watching food slop getting extruded onto a plate, which is something that Marvel will get exceedingly good at in the years to come.
THE FAVREAU DIMENSION
Jon Favreau returned to direct, and the crunched production schedule—not to mention the added stress Marvel put on him to waste valuable screentime setting up their little shared universe—led to his exit from the franchise. Nevertheless, he would be happy to continue playing Happy Hogan, Tony’s useless bodyguard, for the foreseeable future. We’ll be seeing a lot of that character in the weeks ahead.
Also of note here is that in 2009, Favreau did some voicework for the Disney kids movie G-Force, a film about CGI gerbils who are actually secret agents. For obvious reasons, I wasn’t going to cover it for this column. While working on that film, Favreau invited one of his fellow voice actors, Sam Rockwell, to join the cast of Iron Man 2 as Justin Hammer. But this isn’t even the first time Favreau and Rockwell have worked together. Favreau cast him as the hotel concierge in Made, once again proving that the guy really is that loyal to his costars. And we’ll see him again next week. Ya love to see it.
FINAL RATING
1.5 stars (out of 5). S’pretty bad, you guys.
NEXT TIME: Two things!
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