3 out of 5 stars (average)
Note: “Iron Man 2” is not a great film. I could not see its flaws in the theater because it was an “Iron Man” sequel and I wanted it to be amazing. Upon buying the DVD and watching it at home, I found the pacing to be sluggish, some of the writing subpar, and the plot to be all over the place. because of this, my current rating would be a 2.5 out of 5 at the highest (decent). Please enjoy my review from 2010 below.
I watched the original Iron Man movie the night before I saw this one so I could compare the two based on plot, comedy etc. I was not disappointed with this one. A new character named Nick Fury (Samuel L. Jackson) isn’t introduced until the movie has about 50 minutes left and that’s too bad. They had to include him to explain why another new character is in the movie, the Black Widow (the very sexy looking Scarlett Johansson.) She is Nick Fury’s assistant in the comics. Other new characters are the villains, Whip Lash (Mickey Rourke) and Justin Hammer, a competitor of Tony’s company who I disliked so much I don’t care to say who played him.
Anyway, Tony is living it up with his Iron Man fame. Sexy girls and big time parties are basically his life. Oh yeah, and privatizing World Peace. (Beauty contestants will have to pretend to want something else.) Unfortunately, Tony’s source of power for the suit is poisoning him slowly. (Kind of ironic, isn’t it?) Almost all people on the planet think that he is unbeatable save for a politician (Who the heck is Garry Shandling??) who wants the government to take over the Iron Man project so that other countries won’t try to duplicate it. Tony doesn’t agree. Did I mention that since Tony is so busy, he appoints Pepper Potts (Gwyneth Paltrow) as CEO of Stark Industries?
The party keeps going on until Whip Lash shows up and attempts to kill Tony because, well, let’s just say that their fathers didn’t play well on the work playground together. He fails, is sent to jail, and escapes with the help of Hammer who applauds his murder attempt. These two work together to try to accomplish the ultimate goal: eliminate Tony Stark.
Stark must enlist the help of his buddy Rhodey (Don Cheadle, who replaced Terrence Howard from the original film) to help him beat the bad guys in an awesome ending battle sequence that reminded my mother of Rock Em, Sock Em Robots. Was it a good choice? In my opinion the scripts were written around the actors who portrayed Rhodey in the two movies. The man who wrote the script for this film wrote “Tropic Thunder”, which explains why there is more comedy in this film. I have not seen “Tropic Thunder” because it makes fun of people with disabilities in one scene.
This film is funnier then the original. In my opinion the movie had about the same amount of action if not a bit more then its predecessor. Sexual content in this movie: it’s brief, but there is more of it then in the original film. (I’m surprised that the MPAA didn’t include brief suggestive content in this one like they did the last time.) The action is intense in this movie, but it’s awesome. The first action sequence is directed awesomely, and the scene is mildly brutal.
What I did not like about “Iron Man 2” were the frequent visits to the villains. We see Hammer’s face almost every 5 to 10 minutes.
Rated PG-13 for Intense Sequences of Sci-Fi Action and Violence, and Some Language