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Edited by Mrph1 on Jul 29th 2024 at 3:09:00 PM
It probably should have gone full demon in a bottle
That or armor wars
Forever liveblogging the AvengersI mean they get a really good actor to play him (who apparently did a lot of preparation for the role as well), he's got a cool look, he's got an interesting enough backstory to make him a potentially good foil for Tony, they build him up pretty well in the first half, he gets a cool "reveal" scene in Monaco and a cool confrontation scene with Tony in prison, his plan is actually pretty interesting as well, etc.
And then, they barely do anything with him in the second half of the movie. He's stuck in a lab making drones and getting barely any screentime because now the movie wants to focus on "oh look at what a wacky idiot Justin Hammer is" instead (also the SHIELD stuff as well). BTW, Hammer shouldn't have been there imo, he's just distracting. Then his plan suddenly turns much more generic, and he gets taken out after one of the most underwhelming "final battles" in CBM history.
It's actually really frustrating because there was so much potential there and he started out so well. I honestly almost cannot blame Mickey Rourke for being annoyed at Marvel for that.
I feel like Whiplash would have been a stronger villain if they'd let him being put in jail in Morocco be the end of his involvement in the story, and centered the primary conflict around someone else entirely. At that point, he'd achieved what he set out to do: he "made God bleed".
Making him a small player in a larger story about Tony's fall from grace ala Demon in a Bottle would have been perfect. He should have been the inciting incident, not the ultimate villain.
Kinda like what Winter Soldier went on to do with Batroc ze Leapair.
edited 14th Nov '17 12:11:45 PM by TobiasDrake
My Tumblr. Currently side-by-side liveblogging Digimon Adventure, sub vs dub.I think what you're describing sounds actually closer to Baron Zemo.
"All you Fascists bound to lose."
Barely, Zemo while having a very little screen time he did thing(how efective he was can vary but he did things), what tobias is taking is just setting something in mottion and just wait.
I alwasy feel Iron man 2 suffer what I call Sheldon cooper syndrome were a role is so good they try to milk it, backfiring in a way, Iron man 2 have too much tony stark being a dick to everyone...and he got away with it.
"My Name is Bolt, Bolt Crank and I dont care if you believe or not"I don't mind Hammer because he is at least entertaining to watch, but I feel that they should have turned him into Whiplash's patsy from the get go. You can solve a lot of problems with the movie if you establish from the get go that Whiplash wants to destroy not Tony but his legacy (because it is the Stark legacy), and that he intents to use Hammer as a patsy to do it. Hammer initially brushes him off, but Vanko offers him a demonstration, which leads to the attack on the track. Naturally Vanko sets the attack up in a way that he escapes on his own, and the Hammer smuggles him back to the US where Vanko works on the drone.
See, all logical problems solved and now the villain is tied neatly into the themes of the movie. Now clean up the whole "unknown element" nonsense (perhaps Fury gives Tony all information he has, including some of Vanko's files and one of them holds the answer in a stroke of pure irony...Tony can still watch his father getting drunk while looking through them) and allow Coulson to keep Tony under House arrest until his problem is solved and you suddenly have an entirely different movie.
I dont think that is all: first there is the problem of Vanko doing nothing, secodn the fact Tony act like a jerk and getting away with it in the most awfull deus ex machina EVER with new element, there is also the fact the movie get with the feeling Stark got over is daddy issues, which as avenger and civil war show, is......far from the case.
Much of the problem come from Vanko being there and Tony being a jerk, which is something they fixed on Iron man 3(which I feel is very underated, flawed as it is)
"My Name is Bolt, Bolt Crank and I dont care if you believe or not"I don't think IM 2 had Tony get over his daddy issues so much as it acknowledged that he still had them. One of Tony's biggest recurring issues is refusing to acknowledge that he has those issues in the first place, all of which comes back to him feeling like he has to live up to and surpass the expectations people have for him at all times. And if that's not the kind of kneejerk daddy issue that comes from your father having died still disappointed in you, I don't know what is.
Vanko definitely set the precedence for the problem with Marvel villains. Rourke actually did a really good job with the performance, but there was a massive disconnect between Tony's personal drama and Ivan's revenge. The villain should be a representation of the hero's insecurities in some way, and the way the hero defeats them is a part of their character development. Instead Tony spends most of the movie dealing with his personal problems well ahead of the climax and (with Rhodey) beats Vanko by outsmarting him with a superficial trick. It was the same thing with Killian, Tony's personal problems prolong the conflict rather than inform it. In contrast, while Stane wasn't a great villain he helped represent Tony's struggles to change his ways and clean house. Defeating Stane, along with destroying the large arc reactor to do so, felt like the resolution of a character arc instead of just wrapping up the threat.
One of IM 2's biggest problems imo, was trying to do too much. Like they had all of these different plots, and if they'd focused on 1 or 2 of them, then they could have been developed more and you could have had a far more interesting film. But instead, it seemed like they ran out of time and kept resolving everything in the most anti-climactic way possible:
-The "sins of the father/was Howard Stark really a good man or not," well that was potentially interesting. But it doesn't really go anywhere and Nick Fury basically resolves it in a throwaway line of dialogue or two (and BTW, I don't know, given how Fury explains it, how Anton Vanko ends up being the bad guy in all of that either).
-Ivan Vanko's motivations and actually interesting plan for revenge-well lets throw that out the window and make him just a generic villain who know just wants to blow things up.
-Hammer wanted to replace Tony, yet also kind of wanting to BE Tony at the same time-potentially interesting, if they wouldn't have treated him like such a pathetic joke.
-Tony's dying and being crushed under the weight of all of the expectations that he's made the world have towards him-Well he solves the dying issue really easily (and uses one of the most contrived deus ex machina's that I've seen in a movie in a long time as the "key" to it all), and all of the pressure is forgotten about in the third act.
-Etc.
It's like they kept going "oh crap, we need to move onto subplot #9 now. So lets just wrap this up as quickly as possible." And it makes for a bunch of not very satisfying payoffs.
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Well, the theme of Ironman 2 is legacy. Tony spends the movie worrying about the legacy he leaves because he is about to die (that's what the expo is about) and Vanko wants to destroy his legacy. But they don't really clarify this last part all that well, and they spend way too much time with Vanko punking Hammer. Tony doesn't even know that Vanko is out there for most of the movie, first because he doesn't know that he exist and then because he thinks that he died.
"I don't think IM 2 had Tony get over his daddy issues so much as it acknowledged that he still had them"
He look like he kinda get over it, If I remenber well Wheedon have to put tony issues gain in avengers.
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And by using said deus ex machina, tony just really get away with all his crap toward the others, Iron man 2 is pretty much worst tony, and yeah that is counting creating Ultron and is divorce agreetment with cap afterwards
Yeah, but emotional issues are the kind of thing where you only get over them in fits and starts, and dealing with them for the time being doesn't mean they're gone forever. Tony's biggest problems are always internal, and none of his villains are ever going to be a bigger danger to Tony than he is to himself. Which makes him pretty relatable, I think.
I don't think that Tony really gets over it, he just realizes that his father was human and that he actually shares a lot of the flaws his father had. He tries to do better than him as a result, but that doesn't just remove his daddy issues, above all not the sense that he was never good enough for Howard and that he could never live up to Captain America. I don't think that Tony will ever get over this completely. Humans don't work that way.
You could argue "legacy" is a theme surrounding Tony in general. From the first movie he's obsessed with what his name is attached to, what he is going to do to make the world a better place. That just feeds back into my original statement, a villain who is disconnected from the actual struggle of the hero and their defeat doesn't represent how the hero grows.
Pretty much, yeah. Rethinking this, the main problem might be that Tony's main struggle is his own survival while the legacy aspect is the subplot. Whiplash's main theme on the other hand is the legacy aspect while Tony's struggle to survive isn't even an issue. so there would have been a need to weight the survival and the legacy aspect equally, while tying in Whiplash to the survival aspect, too (ie Whiplash could claim that he has the solution to Tony's problem...but the MCU was always reluctant to present Tony as anything but the smartest man in the room).
Well in this case, it's more Howard Stark who saved the day (from beyond the grave). Tony had no clue how to fix his problem and had essentially given up. Until Howard basically handed him all of the information that he needed (and it's implied that Howard might have figured it out for himself if he'd had the kind of technology that Tony has). Tony just had to put it all together.
Also that whole thing was ridiculously contrived overall.
My favorite moment in Iron Man 2 was Tony watching video of his father, and they are both seen drinking at the same time. The movie was mostly about Tony's self-destructive behavior, the Hard-Work Montage of him creating a new element was cool enough but his final discussion with Fury "I was sick, but it's all good now" was weak because he never actually addressed his problems. I think Vanko might have worked better if his revenge mirrored Tony's self-destructive action, instead the focus was on him being a violent psychopath and building up to the action set pieces.
As contrived as it was, I liked the moment where Tony found Howard's message to him and essentially saved him from beyond the grave.
That moment where Tony comes to realize that his dad did care, even if he sucked at showing it was great.
...all the other criticisms are valid though, but for me, Iron Man 2 > Iron Man 3.
Nothing will change that. Ever. None shall try.
One Strip! One Strip!I must be an outlier on this thread, because I liked IM 3 specifically because of the Trevor reveal (and the post-credits scene). The rest of the movie was thoroughly mediocre, but those two moments had me completely cracking up. Imprefer that sort of twist to yet another boring, generic villain.
IM 2, on the other hand, was just dreadful, from the villain being (despite general flatness) more sympathetic than Tony, to Black Widow being walking fanservice rather than a character, to the plot resolution being nonsensical (new element).
edited 16th Nov '17 3:22:28 AM by Galadriel

For me Iron man 2 play into the biggest sin of Marvel universe: is to damn busy worrying about the hero every time that it kinda let other chararter fall, the movie is more worry about tony to even give a damn about something else.
"My Name is Bolt, Bolt Crank and I dont care if you believe or not"