Samurai Jack's Creator Was A Secret Weapon Behind The Scenes Of Iron Man 2
Genndy Tartakovsky makes everything he works on better, but even he wasn't able to fix the hot mess that was "Iron Man 2." In Joanna Robinson, Dave Gonzales, and Gavin Edwards' book "MCU: The Reign of Marvel Studios," the acclaimed filmmaker behind beloved titles like "Samurai Jack," "Dexter's Laboratory," and "Star Wars: Clone Wars" reveals that he was tapped by director Jon Favreau to help streamline the Marvel sequel's climax.
"Jon was a fan, and he liked the sensibility that I had on 'Samurai,'" Tartakovsky said in an interview for "MCU." "I know what I would want from this situation, so I just tried to give it to him — and he could use all of it or none of it." The scene in question takes place in a park in Queens, where a Japanese tea garden was digitally created. Tony Stark (Robert Downey Jr.) and Rhodey (Don Cheadle) face off against hulking drones commanded by villain Ivan Vanko (Mickey Rourke), all while in the middle of a lush — and compared to the franchise's more recent, rushed CGI — realistic-looking, landscape.
The animator helped streamline a jumbled third act scene
In the film's final form, the scene looks pretty great, but apparently finding the right edit was tough. The scene was conceived before most of the sequel's other action sequences, but finished last, after Tartakovsky had given Favreau some ideas to help shape the action. According to "MCU," the animator came up with the idea for Iron Man's 360-degree spin move, coupled with a laser beam that sliced the remaining drones in half. After Tony pulls off the maneuver, Rhodey teases him for not doing that in the first place, but Tony says it was built as a "one-off." Tartakovsky apparently worked with Favreau to tweak the climax, which wasn't completed until reshoots took place just months before the movie's release.
"It became kind of normalized," Tartakovsky said in reference to one rough cut he saw that took away some of the scene's sense of surprise. Luckily, that wasn't the final version. "Then the next time I saw it, it was put back together, more or less," he explained. Marc Chu, who worked as an animation supervisor on the film via Industrial Light and Magic, said that the tea garden fight scene, which also includes Rourke's Whiplash, was "one of those third-act reinventions in the final couple of months."
The movie still wasn't great
Tartakovsky certainly helped pull together the climax of "Iron Man 2," but one great scene unfortunately couldn't save the movie from the middling reputation it still holds today. While plenty of MCU films would end up being much worse than "Iron Man 2," the film is remembered as Marvel's first attempt at shoehorning in multiple new heroes and villains in a limited runtime.
"Everything fun and terrific about 'Iron Man,' a mere two years ago, has vanished with its sequel," Kirk Honeycutt wrote in The Hollywood Reporter's review of the film, continuing, "In its place, "Iron Man 2" has substituted noise, confusion, multiple villains, irrelevant stunts and misguided story lines." In a 2019 retrospective, /Film's Siddhant Adlakha pointed out an even worse problem with the film: the Department of Defense apparently had script approval, making it a propaganda film pretty much by definition.
"Iron Man 2" is not great, but the scene Tartakovsky helped craft is, unsurprisingly, a standout. It's not an all-time-great action scene by any measure, but it is a reminder that even the iffiest of superhero flicks at one point delivered crisp-looking action and CGI. It still doesn't look half as good as "Primal," though.
You can read more about "Iron Man 2" in "MCU: The Reign of Marvel Studios," or watch the movie now on Disney+.