More of the same...but not.

Rating: 6/10 (8 February 2011)

People faulted this film for being good, but not great. What the hell, so will I. Iron Man 2 has all the right ingredients to make a great summer blockbuster superhero film, yet the final product is more of what we already saw, minus the heart.
Iron Man 2 has Tony Stark AKA Iron Man fighting off Ivan Vanko, a man hellbent on revenge, as well as a new arms dealer Justin Hammer. For the sake of cramming more characters in sequels, like all sequels do, we also have Natasha Romanoff/Natalie Rushman, better known as Black Widow.
Black Widow, or the eye candy known as Scar Jo, adds nothing to the film for me. This was one of my worries, too much going on. Iron Man isn't overloaded like X-3 was, but it was getting there. The story is the classic revenge tale, with Mickey Rourke as the villain. A role he was only given because of his recent career revival with The Wrestler. If you watch The Expendables, you'll notice he looks exactly the same as he does here. Almost as if they were shooting next door and he wandered onto the set. Ivan, isn't that memorable as a villain (looks don't count). Rourke tried his best, but there just wasn't much there in the script.
The action set pieces are entertaining enough to appeal to a younger audience. The threat level doesn't feel as big, with the addition of War Machine, again more stuff added, it just felt like we were waiting for Iron Man to succeed. The stakes simply weren't high enough for me to really care this time around.
The party scene with Tony in the Iron Man suit, drunk and shooting off missiles in his house was laughable and was just added to have the two character fight each other. Superhero sequels tend to be a but better (X2, Spiderman 2) but this one just dropped the ball a bit. I don't know if the first one set the bar too high or if the filmmakers were just a bit lazy. Either way, we lost out a bit on this one.