Entertaining but bland

Rating: 6/10 (26 May 2010)

Score: 6.5.
Note: I did not see the first movie, but I didn't think it was necessary.
First, the good parts. Robert Downey Jr. does well playing Iron Man, a superhero who has various personal issues but yet isn't annoying. He's also supposed to be a physicist but unfortunately he seems unconvincing in this role. However, that's easy to dismiss as he rarely actually does any physics in this movie.
The plot isn't very strong. Basically the military wants the Iron Man technology and there's also a nemesis that wants to destroy Iron Man and blow stuff up. Unfortunately none of the issues Stark faces here are particularly tense. This wouldn't be overly problematic if the action made up for it, but it doesn't.
In fact, the action scenes mirror the social conflict in this movie. I never felt that Stark was in any danger in this movie. The longer action scenes were a bit painful because of this. I blame the lack of tension on the G rating of this movie (in some places it's PG-13), but it's on the lower end of PG-13. As a comparison to another superhero movie, Iron Man 2 is far tamer than 'Spiderman'.
Perhaps the most painful part of the action was Scarlett Johansson, whose martial arts choreographed scenes were laughable, in a bad way. In fact, any fighting in this movie is essentially what you would find from a movie for little kids. Disappointing.
The redeeming quality of this movie is some of the dialogue, which was humorous on many occasions, although silly at others. Hopefully the powers that be will realise that trying to make action appeal to such a wide age range is virtually impossible.