Iron Man 2 could be used in future screenwriting courses as an archetypal example of sequel syndrome. Now, I’m not at all familiar with the comic books that Iron Man is based on, so Iron Man 2 may be true and faithful to some original source material. But that does not excuse its underwhelming story and the loud and tiring sequel gimmick of simply taking everything in the first movie and multiplying by 10 or a thousand. Have a scary agent in The Matrix that can do superhuman things? Have 1000 copies of that scary agent in the sequel! See Iron Man defeat oversized evil Iron Jeff Bridges in the original, then see him go up against dozens of evil Iron Man robots in the sequel! How does he beat them? By doing the same things he did in the first movie, only more! And louder! And longer!
The first hour and a quarter of Iron Man 2 is a meandering series of scenes showing us that Tony Stark (Robert Downey Jr.) is (a) dying and (b) a jerk, while Mickey Rourke (Mickey Rourke) is (a) a psychopath and (b) in need of major dental work. Stark’s friends Pepper Potts (Gwyneth Paltrow) and Colonel Rhodes (who used to look like Terrence Howard but now looks like Don Cheadle) do their best to protect Tony from his self-destructive instincts, but this merely gives time for Rourke to join forces with a smarmy defense contractor played by Sam Rockwell to develop an army of Iron Men to defeat Iron Man in the movie’s climactic battle scene.
The first Iron Man was fun in part because Stark was clever and inventive. While the cast in Iron Man 2 is still outstanding, they are not given much of a story to work with. The only one being clever and inventive is Rourke as the big bad guy, and Stark and company win apparently just because they are the good guys.
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