Forget the debate about whether That hard is a Christmas movie because it clearly is and there are more pressing matters: like, is What if…?'S That hard-spoofing Christmas episode actually a better one Iron Man 2 than Iron Man 2?
I admit there is a recency bias. What if…? season 2 started earlier this month, and the episode in question – which features Darcy from the Thor films and Happy Hogan hosting a holiday party at Avengers Tower – only just dropped on Christmas Eve. But with 13 years away from it Iron Man 2, I'm willing to make bold MCU claims that go beyond “it's bad.” Director Jon Favreau got some things right in his sloppy 2010 sequel, and in a 30-minute ode to That hard, What if…? reminds us of one victory: Sam Rockwell was a perfect Justin Hammer. We didn't understand much about him at the time.
Iron Man 2 (which based on many reports on the spot was written by Favreau, star Robert Downey Jr., and tropical thunder's Justin Theroux) is a mess. The film flashes with Tony's Demon in a bottle arc, tries and fails to make a character out of Mickey Rourke's snarling, cockatoo-hugging Whiplash, hastily promotes Rhodey to War Machine and Nick Fury to a real Avengers wrestler, introduces Natasha Romanoff in the gratingest way imaginable, and gives Elon Musk a cameo that looks increasingly worse as the days go by. Pretty bad movie!
But Favreau also cast Sam Rockwell as gun manufacturer Justin Hammer. In an alternate universe, he was the villain at the center, the slimeball alternative to Tony Stark who could keep up with the one-liners. In Iron Man 2 he's a plot to have Iron Man fight armored drones. But speaking of alternate universes, What if…? came to his aid.
Photo: Paramount/Everett Collection
What if…? The third episode of season 2 imagines what could have happened after the events of Iron Man 2. Still in this world, Hammer hijacked the Stark Expo, used Tony's technology against the hero, and ended up in prison for his misdeeds. But Hammer didn't grow into the slammer — he festered. And when he got out, he went to Stark Tower to pull a Hans Gruber on Stark at the Avengers holiday gala.
Not every major Marvel actor has returned to voice their characters What if…?; Since Season 1, Mark Wingert and Lake Bell have done a shockingly high-quality job of emulating the vocal tics of Iron Man and Black Widow, as previously played by Downey Jr. and Scarlett Johansson. But the win here is that Rockwell returns as Justin Hammer, firing cackling Christmas-themed puns like they're Mark 46 armor rounds. He lives for a kind of chaos Iron Man 2 just didn't make for someone who could be that bad.
While Tony and his fellow Avengers eventually show up to save the day – get ready to see Captain America in an elf costume – What if…? gives another Iron Man 2 player due: Happy Hogan. Perhaps Favreau was too modest to give himself a decent set piece in either of the two Iron Man films, but here he is the John McClane who crawls through vents, outruns armed men and, thanks to a few drops of Hulk blood, swings through glass . windows to smash skulls. Favreau also returns to voice the character, which not only makes it pop on a performance level, but also takes the 'what if' of it all to the next level – what if this had been Iron Man 2 all the time?
Writers AC Bradley and Matthew Chauncey, along with director Bryan Andrews, avoid loading the Christmas distraction with too much connectivity or lore – it's really just Happy vs. Hammer to the end, with explosive set pieces thanks to the Iron Legion. In a way, it's a card from the Shane Black playbook, which would wisely create a grounded Marvel Christmas movie of its own with Iron man 3.
We cannot undo what has been done, so nothing will replace anything Iron Man 2 in the ranked history of marvel movies, but What if…? if anything, confirms its existence in a way that no Marvel story really has. But if it's true that Hammer is rotting in a prison cell somewhere, maybe the MCU animated alternate universe anthology series can wake someone up to the fact that the franchise is sitting on gold. Get Sam Rockwell back in the mix – let's keep going Lightning strikes? — stat.