Iron Man 2

Saw Iron Man 2 with a mostly sympathetic crowd of comic folk, so it may skew my reaction to the film a bit.

The film is is hodge-podge example of screenplay writing, with most of the funny bits being pretty funny, while the pacing is also saddled with poor on-screen chemistry between Sam Rockwell and Mickey Rourke, I mean, most of their scenes together just stop the film dead in its tracks.

Robert Downey, Jr. mines Tony Stark's confidence and killer instinct for all they are worth, but amps up the smugness and the debuchery by a magnitude, but for an explainable reason.  Gwyneth Paltrow's Pepper Potts is mainly a perfunctionary foil for Tony, and does bring some laughs from her role.  Don Cheadle as Jim Rhoades was fine, though there were an uninvolving plotline for his role in the film.  Scarlet Johansson's butt should get its own credit because you could tell Director John Favreau really enjoyed displaying it on the big screen.  I didn't have much issue with Johansson's take on the Black Widow with the material she had.

The film itself doesn't have a cohesive narrative, and its resolution doesn't quite have a good dramatic build-up to the finish line.  It's a messy film, littered with some funny scenes and lines (I wouldn't doubt it if some of them were ad-libbed, just like in the first installment), but it's also very unfocused, and feels incomplete, although its running time was over 2 hours.  There's maybe 90 minutes of plot that is stretched out to 2 hours.

The action sequences aren't great, there is too much close-in shots, not enough wide shots, or when it's wide, the action isn't interesting.  Also, it's much more interesting to have the camera going at the speed of Iron Man, and giving us the action from that viewpoint, than from a static view point, and things are just whisking by quickly and uninvolvingly so.  That being said, there is a couple of sweet moves that go by far too quickly to be fully appreciated in the final act.

I give it 2.75 stars or a grade of B- (mainly for the funny bits).