Look, I’ll dispense with the niceties today because you’re probably going to want to stone me in about ten minutes. I’m going to caution you about a certain movie that we’re all patiently waiting for. I don’t have any insider information or anything, and I haven’t seen the movie, but I do read comics and have been burned by their movies in the past, and like any jilted lover I have an impeccable memory.
First I’ll be fair and say that Spider-Man 2 is actually the best Marvel movie and the second greatest comic book movie of all time. So the odds of this movie being good are fair. Now that the origin is out of the way, the movie has an issue to deal with. Filling time. Without the origin to suck up a bunch of time, the story has to fill up the entire films run time and sometimes comic book movies struggle ala The Dark Knight.
With sequels the other difficulty is repetition and not falling on a formula. The resistance to this produces wild results that are hit or miss and I think personally it all comes down to the source material. The source material isn’t as easy to work with as we would like to admit, I’m sure of it. They make too many crappy movies every year to say otherwise. When comic book movies are bad, they are really bad and I think the material is to blame.
This new Kick-Ass movie looks terrible and that book only has a handful of issues, there is something deceptively difficult about comic book movies and this could easily befall Iron Man 2, there I said it.
The biggest issue that this new movie faces is the over stuffed factor that hurts a lot of superhero movies. With the cast growing considerably over the first movie the move as to juggle all these new characters at the same time keeping the focus on Robert Downey Jr. appropriately enough. There just might be too many people in the hen house or whatever.
More than one hero indicates a larger world that comic book movies have a hard time projecting. Asking an audience to accept Spider-Man is one thing, but accepting that Spider-Man knows and talks to Daredevil is asking too much. There is something about the world that superheroes live in that is hard to accept for the uninitiated. Sequels tend to dip into the larger world that the hero lives in and therefore finds itself in shaky territory, likely because they have to fill so much space.
I don’t want to spoil your Iron Man 2 fantasies, I really don’t. I’ll be at the theater right next to you and I really want it to be good. But I’ve been burned before. Especially when the promo’s seemed like such a sure thing.
