Goes overboard in "destruction" but kept my attention the whole way.

Rating: Null/10 (20 October 2013)

Robert Downey Jr. is one of those actors that I just like to see in movies. No matter what the role I find him entertaining with his mix of serious and funny. To me he is what makes this a good movie.
Here he is back as Tony Stark, the wealthy inventor who made the first Iron Man suit while imprisoned in Afghanistan. (The movie does a very brief review of that.) He lives in a futuristic looking house that almost resembles a space ship, on a high bluff overlooking the Pacific Ocean. This is an important fact, since one scene features the very graphic destruction of his house after he challenges the bad guys and gives out his address. But that gets a bit ahead of the story.
There is a new terrorist and he is bent on destroying the USA and its President. We see him in videos patched into regular TV programming feeds. He says he can't be stopped, he will always be ahead of his pursuers. Of course Iron Man Stark vows to find him and kill him. And that is what sparked his perhaps rash decision to give his exact address, although I don't think it would have been hard to find anyway. But it makes for a story element.
Gwyneth Paltrow is back as his love interest Pepper Potts, and Don Cheadle is back as Colonel James Rhodes who also uses one of the iron suits to fight crime.
The bad guy, no pun intended, turns out to be Guy Pearce as Aldrich Killian, someone who knew Stark back in 1999, and in the years since, along with his partner in crime, Rebecca Hall as Maya Hansen, had developed a technology that was imperfect, sometimes it caused the person to explode, and that is why they could not find bomb or explosive fragments at the terrorist bombing sites.
So the story comes down to a contest between Stark and Killian, both capable fighters, to see if Iron Man can save the world yet again.
SPOILERS: The man they saw on TV as the terrorist was Ben Kingsley, who played an actor named Trevor Slattery, hired by Killian and dressed in beard and Eastern garb, to disguise the fact that the real terrorists were scientists. With even more battles and destruction Stark finally gets rid of Killian, it seems, although maybe they were setting the stage for a sequel. Just entertaining fluff, lots of action. I never expected to see William Sadler as a President, but there he was as President Ellis.