The True Blue "Iron Man 2" Movie Review

If only Rise of the Machines wasn't taken, surely this would've been the movie to use this moniker as it's subheading.

Iron Man 2 opens on familiar grounds with clips of the end of the original where Tony Stark (Robert Downey Jr.) reveals himself to be Iron Man, a robotic superhero known for reckless amounts of peril in what is believed to be world peace. He has taken his fame and exploited it with an expo and his rich bachelor persona, naive to anything dangerous ever occurring again.
Of course, there couldn't be a sequel without some sort of peril.


Cue Ivan Vanko (Mickey Rourke), a Russian with a parakeet and a blue prints to the suit that will eventually go on to work against Stark as Vanko meets up with Justin Hammer (Sam Rockwell), a man set on recreating the Iron Man suit for profit.
With a supporting cast featuring Scarlett Johansson, Gwenyth Paltrow, Samuel L. Jackson, and Don Cheadle (replacing Terrence Howard as Rhodes) and a script written by "Tropic Thunder" mastermind Justin Theroux, the set up almost seems to be perfect entertainment, especially since it's still in the hands of director Jon Favreau, who helped create the international phenomenon with the first.
It's easy to argue yes and no. The first was an origin story that introduced the world to Stark, revealing his vulnerabilities and how the suit came to be. It was like Batman Begins, but with more armor, less darkness. If the back story wasn't enough to intrigue you into the bachelor way of life, there's little hope of really ever loving Stark's snide and egotistical persona. If you also disliked the action sequences, it gets a lot worse here. There's more bells and whistles coming at you, so bring some ear muffs, because you may experience hearing loss after awhile.
While it falls into several cliches of action movies and to an extent commercial superhero movies, it does manage to keep attention with a versatile performance from Downey, who plays a convincing jerk, even on the verge of a breakdown. While he does it well (and let's face it, anyone else could've made the character perversely lamer), it's not enough to make us root for him and he exists mainly as an enigma, convinced of working alone.
However, Iron Man 2 shows a lot of promise underneath all of the rusty dents of it's genre's trappings. Instead of focusing heavily on Stark, Favreau took a genius turn of creating quite possibly one of the more inventive pyramid schemes in a movie where the subplots eventually weave together at the right time. Basically, if you were bored with this character, just wait five minutes and we'll get to the next.
The subplots really gave it some extra credibility as well, managing to show some inventive intelligence to everyone's plans, including some blasts from the past. Jackson and Johansson especially steal the show as they get the ball rolling halfway through and manage to double handedly make the pinnacle of Downey's overacting peak and put him back on the right path towards a halfway decent comeback story.
By the end, the genre features too many trappings to really make this an exceptional movie (a man in an iron suit? Give me the Terminator any day). Yes, there's plenty of pointless action. There's also a lot of boasting and incredibly redundant and bad dialogue at moments. Sam Rockwell manages to turn in one of the worst performances of the year, which can only be seen when the great work of Mickey Rourke is not alongside him. There's even a bogus romantic plot line that doesn't steal too much time from the movie, but felt to have had no real necessity in the movie.
However, despite all of the flaws in the poorly delivered script, Robert Downey Jr. manages to keep marveling audiences with his amazing versatile acting chops. Having done almost every genre justice convincingly in the past five years, he remains one of the more talented actors working today. This continues to show his range and proof that even when the script sucks, all you need is Downey and you can get an above average outcome.
So, if you're into mindless action sequences and a bogus rise-and-fall story, feel free to buy a ticket to one of the more entertaining releases this summer. Even if you're into a good concept weaving itself together at the right time, go see it. This movie won't change opinions on superhero movies but just prove what they can be with a little more effort.

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