Anyone who knows me, knows that I’m not a big fan of superhero movies. I yawned at all the Spiderman movies. Batman, Transformers, Incredible Hulk, Green Lantern, Hellboy, and on and on. They are just not my cup of tea. But I will admit up front that the Iron Man movies are really pretty good. The first one reminded me a lot of an Independence Day type of film, and it was not on some forgotten planet in some fantasy city, but real live, current times, and addressed current problems. Well, I’m not sure that Iron Man 2 is actually better than the first in the series, but I think it’s at least as good. Iron Man (himself, not the film) has some issues. For one thing, the very thing that keeps him alive is killing him. So the clock is ticking and he’s trying to get his house (and company) in order in case he’s not going to be around much longer.

And of course he’s got competition now. Like all superheroes, people are going to get used to him, and start to doubt and take him for granted. Especially with his declining health and dropping spirits. But Mickey Rourke comes along with a long held grudge looking for revenge and turns into a swell villain amongst a slew of villains in this film.

The ending is very exciting and fast paced, but if there is any problem, it’s that it may have ended up being a little underwhelming a finish. It’s like playing weeks on the latest video game working your way down the dungeon to finally face the “Dark Lord” and he ends up being pretty much of a wimp. Fifteen minutes after the movie is over, you may want to think back and try to remember exactly how he was brought down. If you’re like me, you don’t even remember. It should have been a fitting climax, but I don’t think it was that memorable.

But the entire story is a grand adventure, very exciting, and the look of the movie is stunning! All in all it was a great film, and I rate it pretty highly despite the little bit of fizzle in the ending. At least the story wraps up pretty well beside the ending of the bad guy. Very enjoyable couple hours, and a decent sequel.

==Written by Ed Goettman ==

==From: Ed's Review Dot Com (www.edsreview.com)==

Jon Favreau's hyped-up and amped-up follow-up to "Iron Man" doesn't have much in the way of surprises for its audience, nor is it interested in challenging or transcending the conventions of the comic-based action flick. But, at the same time, it does what it sets out to do: bombard you with vapid yet witty dialogue, fantastic mechanized machismo, inventive villains and allies, and big, bright explosions, which produce surprisingly few human casualties but lots of lowered property values and spectacularly shattered machines. And it does all this, for my money, better than the original did.

Robert Downey, Jr. reprises his role as power-armored playboy industrialist Tony Stark, whose rampant chauvinism and soi disant "textbook narcissism" are unadulterated, and even amplified, versions of his excesses in the first film. Stark's dissipations are exacerbated this time around by knowledge that he's being slowly poisoned to death by the palladium that powers both his prosthetic heart and his trademarked armor, which can now, in a striking synthesis of convenience and style, become a metallic briefcase when not being worn. (Industrial designers take note! This is the wave of the future.) Tony's dire situation is worsened by the pack of ne'er-do-wells who've set their sights on him, drawn to his vertiginous fame and power.

This time, his enemies are rival military-industrial magnate Justin Hammer (Sam Rockwell)--whose incompetence makes you wonder how the hell he became the head of a multinational arms corporation in the first place--and the violently alienated, heavily-inked and deviously inventive Russian physicist Ivan Vanko, aka Whiplash (Mickey Rourke). Rourke's performance as Vanko is one of the high points of the film; he brings a hardbitten and righteously enraged panache to Whiplash that makes a good foil for Downey's self-indulgent and idealistic Stark, and he provides a modicum of moral ambiguity to the otherwise superheroically black-and-white storyline. Rourke himself devised many of Vanko's quirkier characteristics, including his tattoo-age (borrowing a little from Viggo Mortensen in "Eastern Promises," I suspect), his metallic teeth and a beloved parrot. Rourke was apparently so insistent on these props that he paid for them out of his own salary.

"Iron Man 2's" script, penned by Justin Theroux, is pretty formulaic stuff, and the relationship between Tony Stark and Pepper Potts (Gwyneth Paltrow, whose potential as an actress is wasted here) is just as trite as it was in the original picture. However, the dialogue is both more abrasive and more amusing than that of the first film, particularly Stark's slew of smarmy innuendoes. Stark has become the Lord Rochester of the Marvel universe, and I suspect the emphasis on his sleazy wit is meant to differentiate him from the slightly more genteel and darksomely tragic but otherwise similar millionaire-playboy of the DC Comics universe, Bruce Wayne. Both Theroux and Downey showcase their skills best when Stark is at his worst, and there are a few moments, midway through the film, when things nearly go the way of a glibly Fitzgerald-esque evaluation of the American dream....but the movie quickly rights itself and rockets back onto its action-hero trajectory.

The substitution of Don Cheadle for Terrence Howard as War Machine (Howard had a salary dispute with the filmmakers, which led to his withdrawal) does little to affect the character, whose role in this film is more understated than in the original. Sadly for Cheadle, this film offers about as much potential to develop his acting skills as did "Brooklyn's Finest." (Don deserves better, don't you think?) Scarlett Johansson's entry into the Marvel cinema franchise as Natasha Romanoff (aka Natalie Rushman, whose moniker "Black Widow" goes unmentioned but whose trademark suit is on full display) contributes the ultra-feminine-but-utterly-ass-kicking-woman-in-incredibly-tight-clothes oomph that was missing from the first film, as Favreau and Theroux check off another item on their list of contemporary comic-action clichés. Her few combat sequences are both beautifully shot, with flickering, high-contrast, tracer-inducing rapidity (the film mercifully avoids the use of Wachowskian slowed-down action sequences, which ruinously characterized Zack Snyder's "Watchmen").

Favreau cheekily queries the line between fiction and reality through his use of cameos by famous newscasters (Christiane Amanpour, formerly of CNN, and Bill O'Reilly, of FOX News, both appear as themselves, as does Olivia Munn of "Attack of the Show" and "Larry King," who is actually played by Stan Lee....'nuff said), but these appearances serve little purpose, since the sequel gives up on the original's token efforts to engage with contemporary US political issues. Which is probably just as well, as political commentary and comics adaptations have so far largely made painfully bad bedfellows.

==Written by Sean Moreland==

==From: In Review Online (www.inreviewonline.com)==

After the high-flying adventures of the first Iron Man picture, the billionaire arms manufacturer and irrepressible bon vivant Tony Stark (Robert Downey Jr.) finds himself nursing a hangover. But not like any hangover he's had before: this one is toxic, a potentially deadly condition resulting from heavy metals (or something) bleeding out of the hardware he's installed in the middle of his chest. This is the problem Stark needs to solve in Iron Man 2, not to mention the threat from resentful Russian science whiz Ivan Vanko (Mickey Rourke), whose father helped create the Iron Man technology. There's an even bigger problem for the film: the need to set up a future Marvel Comics movie universe in which a variety of veteran characters will join forces, a requirement that slows down whatever through-line the movie can generate (although fanboys will have a good time digging the clues laid out here). Actually, the main plot is no great shakes: another Iron Man suit is deployed (Don Cheadle, replacing Terrence Howard from the first film, gets to climb inside), Stark continues to bicker with assistant Pepper Potts (Gwyneth Paltrow), and a weaselly business rival (Sam Rockwell) tries to out-do the Iron Man suit with an army of Vanko-designed drones. Mickey Rourke is a letdown, burdened by a wobbly Russian accent and looking skeptical about the genre foolishness around him, and Scarlett Johansson has to wait until the final couple of reels to unleash some butt-kickin' skills as the future Black Widow. That climax is sufficiently lively, and the initial half-hour, including Stark's smirky appearance before a Senate committee and a wacky showdown at the Monaco Grand Prix, provides a strong, swift opening. But the lull between these high points is crying for more action and more Downey improv. --Robert Horton