The MCU’s first sequel has a mixed reputation, as Greg D. Smith discusses in the third part of his major retrospective. Tony Stark faces his greatest challenge yet as he discovers that the very device keeping him alive is also killing him. Meanwhile, a new foe arises and an old irritant turns up the volume.

Iron Man 2. Not for the Iron Man franchise, you may note, the pretension of subtitles. Thor had his Dark World, Cap his Winter Soldier and even the Avengers their Age of Ultron, but the Iron Man movies have stubbornly refused to affix anything more than a number to their titles to indicate progress. Such is the confidence of the central character and the actor who now seems indistinguishable from him that one can see why such a decision might be made. There are those who will tell you this is hubris, and that the proof lies in the sudden drop in quality from its predecessor displayed by this film. I am here to advance the case for why these people are wrong.

Picking up six months after the end of the first film, we first find Tony pulling a very Tony stunt, jumping from a plane in his Iron Man suit to land, midst fireworks and dancing girls, in the middle of the Stark Expo, a showcase of technology from around the globe, and a tradition started by his father. It’s a bold entrance, and reads as a statement of intent for the film in general – no, things aren’t going to be toned down, rather everything is being dialled up.

And there’s a reason. Tony still hasn’t changed all that much – he cracks wise, he messes about, he doesn’t even take a senate hearing seriously, as Senator Sterns (played to perfection by the dearly missed Garry Shandling) attempts to force the handover of the Iron Man suit to the government. There’s an edge though, that was absent before. Tony is pushing things a little too far, acting out a little too much, because there is something definite on his mind. The Palladium used at the core of the miniaturised ARC reactor, that powers the electromagnets keeping shrapnel from piercing his heart, is slowly poisoning him. Despite his best efforts, including guzzling some weird green goop and having Jarvis search every possible element in existence, his fate appears to be sealed. Finally, Tony is confronted with a problem which neither his wealth nor his genius appear able to overcome.

Meanwhile, just to add to his problems, a certain Ivan Vanko has an axe to grind with him. Familial history binds the two, Tony’s father Howard having banished Vanko’s father to an ignominious fate in Russia decades previously. Seeing Tony now lauded as a superhero and American Icon in the wake of having watched his father die painfully and penniless is too much, and Vanko begins work on constructing his own ARC reactor using the very plans his father stole (and which got him into the trouble in the first place). Remember the Dark Mirror theory of comic book villains I mentioned previously in my Incredible Hulk piece? Well, Vanko is one half of that in this movie (and I suspect that this is why many people felt unsatisfied by him as the movie’s ‘villain’). Vanko proves that he specifically has the exact level of genius that Tony does – he is able to build his own ARC reactor out of ‘scraps’ just as Tony did. Maybe not in a cave, but not exactly in a well-funded lab either. He also modifies the reactor for use in his own specialised weapon, and when he confronts Tony with it for the first time, he’s able to use it to damage the Iron Man armour – even Tony admits he’s impressed.

Unfortunately, thanks to his issues, Tony is also rapidly plunging off the deep end. His drinking is becoming beyond a joke, and his antics increasingly destructive. Jumping into a race car at the Monaco classic is dumb enough, without the added bonus of Vanko then turning up and destroying his car as he attempts to murder him. Add in a birthday party at which he dons the armour and, acting increasingly erratically, is eventually confronted by a pissed off Rhodey in one of the other suits, and things are getting really bad. Convinced of his impending demise, Tony self-destructs in exactly the way an addict who has no conventional boundaries imposed on him would, and it’s painful to watch.

While we’re at this point, let’s talk Rhodey. Three movies in, and the MCU was already having to deal with its first recasting of a major character. Again, I won’t get into the behind the scenes back and forth that has been done to death elsewhere, but will simply say this – Don Cheadle is the Rhodey we never knew we needed until we saw him. Howard does fine in the first movie, but there’s always the sense that Tony is forever one step in front of him. There’s no give and take in the power dynamic of that relationship, and it feels odd that an Air Force Colonel is so easily walked over, even by a billionaire. Cheadle plays the role much better. He’s not here for Tony’s crap, he tells him as much when he needs to, and although taking what becomes the War Machine suit is perhaps harsh, it’s also exactly in keeping with the character and his background, and you couldn’t imagine Howard having pulled it off. Cheadle nails this part on, hard, and it’s no wonder he’s been given increasing screen time as the MCU has progressed.

So, if Vanko is one half of Tony’s Dark Mirror, who’s the other? We meet him first at the Senate hearing, speaking on the side of the government. Justin Hammer, weapons designer and arms dealer. It’s clear as the film progresses that Hammer is clever, but not brilliant, though blessed with equal if not more vanity than Tony ever was. Obviously, with the removal of Stark Industries from the weapons market, Hammer has stepped up to fill the gap. Hammer has the narcissism, the arrogance and the wealth of Tony, but lacks the brilliance – when he orchestrates Vanko’s escape so that he can use him to finalise development of his ‘Hammer Drone’ robots, the two halves meet and the Dark Mirror of Tony is complete.

But Tony is at death’s door, self-destructing and has lost the interest/trust of the two people closest to him, Rhodey having stolen the War Machine suit and delivered it to the Air Force and Pepper having made it clear that even if her boss doesn’t care about the direction of the company he’s put her in charge of, she does. It’s at this point that Nick Fury turns up and reveals the dark secret of Tony’s current PA, former underwear model and apparent Thai-Bo expert Natalie Rushman, being none other than Natalia Romanov, the Black Widow.

Now, this is the point at which the film admittedly starts to groan a little under the weight of a little piece of plot-related material I like to call handwavium. Romanov dispenses some injection that serves as a temporary respite to the onset of the Palladium poisoning and Fury delivers a verbal ass kicking before telling Tony to get back to work on finding the element he needs, because he ‘hasn’t tried them all’ yet. From this, we eventually get to Tony stumbling across an outtake of his Dad talking directly to him from the past, which inspires him to look at the design of the old Expo site from the fifties and…look yes, it’s a huge plot leap, and it’s weird the way that it gets in there, but it does address some stuff that needs addressing. Howard is shown to have been a drinker himself, to have been capable of humour as well as the steely indifference we have had hinted at to that point. Tony is revealed to have wanted his father’s love as a young boy but to have felt frozen out, to the extent that maybe that’s why he avoids closeness even now. Most important of all, we learn that Howard was every bit the genius that his son is, which becomes important as the MCU grows and relies on Howard for much of the tech stuff in the older days flashbacks. Could it have been handled better? Undoubtedly yes, but it’s a movie about a man who saves the day flying in a big metal suit – if your problem at this point is that a particular part of the plot seems ‘far-fetched’ then I don’t really know what to say to you.

At any rate, while Tony is busy discovering New Element (at least it wasn’t Unobtanium!), Hammer is busy cutting a deal with Vanko to make his Hammer Drones work properly in time for the Stark Expo. There’s some more nonsense about a bird and so on and again yes, it’s stuff that could maybe have been handled better but I’m interested in the power dynamics at play here – Hammer has the power and the wealth to do whatever he wants to Vanko (so he thinks) but he can’t because he needs Vanko’s smarts to do what he needs to get his big moment, upstaging Tony and grabbing a nice fat government contract. Vanko still doesn’t have a pot to piss in, but he is so much smarter than Hammer, or indeed any of the people around him, that it doesn’t matter. By the time Hammer realises he’s been betrayed, it’s far too late for him to do anything about it.

And so we get the big Marvel finale. It should be added at this point that despite the ‘MCU Skybeam’ ending being an oft-moaned about trope of the series which is traced by some back to the original Iron Man, here it doesn’t feature. What we do get is the first instance of our heroes (plural, because of course Rhodey turns up to help in the War Machine suit – that’s who he damned well is) facing off against an army of faceless, disposable drones led by one big badass guy. Though it’s become a trope associated most with the Avengers after Loki and the Chitauri hordes and Ultron and his army of clones, this trope began here as Vanko sent his army of Hammer Drones to soften up Tony and Rhodey and then arrived himself in a bigger, more armoured version of his ‘Whiplash’ gear. The quips alone in this scene are amazing – the one-upmanship of Tony and Rhodey in terms of weaponry and who’s the ‘Big Gun’ of the two of them really work to cement both their relationship and the scene itself. Tony is feeling invincible once again, having solved his Palladium issue with New Element, and his cockiness belies the fact that Rhodey is the more experienced warrior. Rhodey’s quiet calm and confidence under fire are somewhat undermined by the fact that Hammer weaponised his suit, meaning that when he busts out his own ‘Big Gun’, it fizzles rather pathetically. The point is, here are two very different guys who, outside of their necessary relationship as we find them at the beginning of the franchise (as Tony sold arms to the government and Rhodey acted as his liaison), have no real reason to be friends, much less work together. This scene shows us why they need one another – Tony’s brilliance combining with Rhodey’s nous as well as Rhodey’s ‘take no crap’ attitude and refusal to be dazzled by Tony balancing out the latter’s excesses of obnoxious self-belief. They work as a unit precisely because of who they are. Neither could defeat the Hammer Drones and Vanko without the other, and both need Nat (picking up after the boys from the very outset) to complete the deal.

This is a movie fundamentally built on relationships, as well as how they can equally be either the doom or salvation of a person, depending on what each brings. Tony’s relationship with his father is the opposite of Vanko’s relationship with his own, but both play key roles in their respective characters. Tony drives away those closest to him with a downward spiral of self-destructive behaviour as he feels that all hope is lost, until Nick Fury gives him the nudge he needs to start making things right. Vanko and Hammer each wish to use the other to advance a very personal goal – they are united only in a hatred of Stark, which itself has different foundations for each of them. Rhodey and Tony are united by a common need to do the right thing, even despite of the very different approaches they have to that goal. And Tony and Pepper are united by a genuine affection, which means that even though both have very different approaches to almost everything, they care for one another deeply enough to make it work. That the director held off on the relationship between the two of them blossoming into anything else until the very end of the second movie ties in with that restraint I mentioned in the Iron Man feature. Traditional superhero movies before would have had the guy get the girl, even if he immediately let her go again (I’m looking at you, Raimi’s Spider-Man, or indeed any of the Batman movies from 1990’s Burton vehicle through to Schumacher’s Forever) but Tony was made to wait for Pepper because he needed to grow to be the man she wanted.

Even at the end of Iron Man 2, he isn’t. That cockiness is still there, that arrogance is only marginally tempered, but he is at least on the trajectory that will lead him eventually to being an integral core part of the Avengers team. Iron Man is where he learns to think about people other than himself. Iron Man 2 is where he learns to start working with others to get things done, Maybe he doesn’t play nicely with them yet, but he’ll get there. That’s why Iron Man 2 is, for me at least, a much better movie than it gets given credit for.