A fun watch, that misses a punch...

Rating: Null/10 (21 June 2020)

Iron Man 2 is an enjoyable enough watch but does not reach the highs of its predecessor.
You get the feeling that this is a connector movie, building up to a bigger storyline, introducing new characters, exploring new dimensions of the existing ones, but in all this, the main story takes a hit and almost seems like an afterthought.
RDJ as Tony Stark is as brilliant as ever and carries the film effortlessly, Gwyneth Paltrow as Pepper Potts and Don Cheadle as Rhodey too do well and we see a deeper connect with Tony with the two of them. We're introduced to Scarlett Johansson's Black Widow, who gets one particularly deligjtlful action sequence, and get to see a bit more of Nick Fury.
Sam Rockwell clearly has a lot of fun playing the opportunitistic Justin Hammer, and Mickey Rourke does a good job of the main antagonist, Ivan Vanko. With Vanko Marvel tried for the first time to introduce a layered complex villian with a backstory, and yet while that starts off well, that track in the story is left for dead by the second half, and he's just the bad guy, doing bad things.
The movie plot suffers as a result and you feel less invested into the end game. This movie was always going to be a link, as there is a much larger universe to which it needed to integrate, but still, it could have invested more in the primary storyline to elevate this movie to the same exalted height of Iron Man.
Overall, an enjoyable film, has its moments of conflict, lots of humour and good action sequences.