An Iron Man film without any "spark"

Rating: 4/10 (10 May 2010)

Iron Man 2 focuses on humor, rather than action or excitement and this causes the movie to be mild. Iron Man 2 is entertaining, but entertainment comes from humor most of the time. Therefore, Iron Man 2 is more like a Saturday show, a Saturday night entertainment than an exciting super hero movie which has a lot of action. Probably it is because the director, Jon Favreau is a director who made comedy movies like Elf or Zathura and the screen writer is the writer of Tropic Thunder, then much (sometimes too much) humor is inevitable. This is what Iron Man 2 has. In addition, the execution and the story were better in the first installment. However, there is a more interesting villain played by great Mickey Rourke (even if even this character is mostly passive throughout) The villain of the first movie was a businessman as known. There are some great visuals, War Machine played by Don Cheadle is included in the team, there are nice cameos like Samuel L. Jackson and Scarlett Johannson is really sexy. There are a few real wow moments and most of them are in The Grand Prix scene. It was the best scene of the movie to me. It could have been longer, but it is definitely satisfying. However, till the final part, you have to wait, if you want to see action. Probably, directors have started to believe that in an action movie, if there is less action, but more drama, the movie becomes more deep and more serious. Some people call this as Spider-Man 3 syndrome. Iron Man 2 suffers from this syndrome at times, in the middle part of the movie. It makes us feel like we watch a comedy drama and this is not surprising, because as I mentioned, the director of the movie is Jon Favreau who made comedy movies, played in comedy movies and the script writer of the movie is Justin Theroux who wrote a comedy before, Tropic Thunder. As for the characters, Robert Downey Junior is again the star of the movie, but he was more funny, cool and witty in the first movie. Natasha Romanoff played by Scarlett Johannson is passive most of the time, the operation scene was entertaining, but it is sad that this character consists of a few showy acts. Ivan Vanko (Rourke) is not a wasted character like Natasha Romanoff, but mostly he sits down and masterminds the chaos. Then, he is included in a disappointing and too short final fight (a few minutes) It starts and finishes in a trice. There are three action parts in the movie. The first one is The Grand Prix scene, in the second one, Iron Man and War Machine are included in a chaos (pretty long) and the third one is the final fight. As a result, Iron Man is very humorous at times, entertaining at times, otherwise disappointing.