I enjoyed it, generally, but it didn’t have the freshness and greatness of the first Iron Man, I thought.
It has triggered a lot of writing on the blogs I read. I thought one of the most interesting was from Ross Douthat at the New York Times, who is…
“… wondering why we couldn’t have a movie about a Tony Stark-like figure — say, a screwball comedy about a billionaire’s romance with his omnicompetent assistant, which is basically the best thing about the “Iron Man” franchise anyway — in which he isn’t a superhero at all. And from there, it’s an even shorter leap to questions like, “what kind of movies would a clean-and-sober Robert Downey, Jr. be making if he wasn’t already signed up for ‘The Avengers’ and ‘Iron Man 3’ and the sequel to last’s year ‘Sherlock Holmes’ (which was basically a superhero flick dressed up in Victoriana)”? Or “what kind of films might Jon Favreau/Bryan Singer/Sam Raimi/Christopher Nolan have directed if they hadn’t been sucked into the superhero vortex”? Or “wouldn’t it have been nice to see a Heath Ledger/Christian Bale confrontation in which they weren’t saddled with the grim conventions of the comic-book blockbuster?” Or … well, you get the idea.
I think he’s generally right. I love movies, and I love superhero movies. But consider the cast of Iron Man 2 for example: Robert Downey Jr, Gweneth Paltrow, Mickey Rourke, Jon Favreau, Scarlett Johansson, Don Cheadle, Sam Rockwell, and Samuel L. Jackson. That’s a pretty stellar cast. Could they be in a better movie that didn’t involve suits of iron? Of course.
On the other hand, would that movie have made $133 million dollars in its opening weekend? Not a chance. So if seeing a fun cast with good movie-making means they all have to be superheroes … maybe that’s not such a bad thing.