I’ve been waiting on Iron Man 2 ever since the credits rolled on Iron Man 1.

It’s an event film for me.  I’ve been with this character for twenty something years now and when the first film came out it showed the world what I and my fellow shellheads already knew.  Iron Man is awesome.

So after watching the first film and thinking about the sequel I became aware of what appeared to be the rule of Marvel in films.

The second film is better than the first.

It’s certainly true of Spider-Man, Hulk, some argue that Blade 2 is superior, X-Men 2, Fantastic Four 2 and I can’t imagine that Ghost Rider 2 is going to be worse than Ghost Rider 1.  X-Men and Spider-Man also expands upon the rule suggesting that the third film is worse than the first two.

Iron Man 2 then is the exception to the rule.  It’s nowhere near as good as the first Iron Man on pretty much every level.  I’m going to break down my reaction into dot points because my brain hurts too much with disappointment (I may be exaggerating how bad this is as I am disappointed but I doubt it).

The bad…

• the script is some of the worst rubbish I’ve heard come out of the even the poorest written comic books
• the plot is stupid and wastes the groundwork put together in the first film and the best of the Iron Man comic series
• the music is a joke considering the soundtrack (I’ve got a whole post coming dedicated to this)
• The Black Widow puts female comic book characters well back into the 80s
• Samuel L Jackson figured that acting is no longer required and just walks through his admittedly poorly written dialogue
• His eye patch doesn’t fit well and his costume looks stupid especially in the daytime (though comic book accurate)
• The science in the film is bad, no I mean super bad, no I mean Superman putting the Great Wall of China back together with his eyes bad.  If Stark had pulled out a sonic screwdriver to fix a bunch of stuff I would not have raised an eyebrow.
• Whiplash is a stupid character that no one ever really liked in the first place and it makes no sense that he wasn’t the Crimson Dynamo
• I don’t believe that Mickey Rourke is a super genius.  Makes Nicole Kidman as a brain surgeon look believable.  I need to clarify here too, I like Rourke and his inclusion could have been great but it wasn’t.
• Really stupid plot… I mentioned that already right?  Think Transformers 2 stupid.
• The stinger at the end of the credits is so underwhelming it’s really annoying – yet people are getting really excited over it.
• The complete misuse of Tony Stark’s alcohol problem (I can’t be more specific).
• The boss fight is essentially the same as the first one.

The good…

• The cast is great, I mean they are really a good looking cast on paper and on screen, they’re charming and they do their absolute best with what they have to work with.  There are a couple of exceptions,  Sam Jackson as already mentioned and Scarlett Johansson.
• It generally looks pretty cool  though not as good as the first one
• War Machine is kind of cool
• Stark’s hair was pretty neat and his suits (clothing suits no armour) were very nice
• The briefcase armour is badass but poorly executed in the film

I’m actually having trouble thinking up nice things about the film, I love the character and will buy this on Blu-ray but then I also bought Terminator 4 solely on the fact that I think it ‘looks good’.

One last thing about the film and it’s just a little annoying thing but there were whole chunks of the film where I knew what was going to happen because I saw it in the trailers.  Plus it was distracting when what seemed to be great lines in the trailer were dropped from the film and replaced with other scenes.

People are still going to love Iron Man 2 because there are people out there who LOVE Transformers 2 and whilst I don’t understand it I’m happy that they get something out it and don’t think any less of them.

In the end I just wanted something much better.