Never outnumbered, never outgunned - Iron Man II

It can't be easy to follow up a particularly well loved title and i'm trying to rack my brains with regards to whether or not Jon Favreau has pulled it off, so to speak with Iron Man 2. I went in, as most did with a certain amount of excitement. Remember 2008? and that despondent reservation which you had when you entered the auditorium for Iron Man. None of that this time. No reservations as to whether the guy who played Matt Murdock's bumbling Lawyer sidekick in the disappointing Daredevil could direct better than he could act (although he does play, yet another bumbling sidekick character in this...) Well last time he did it and very well indeed. It was Marvel's first solo foray into film production and it worked.

I enjoyed Iron Man 2, it was fun, funny and so self deprecatingly candid, maybe to the point of Emoism (that's a new word for Naval gazing without any real point, or benefit) I found it difficult to relate to the Tony Stark of this film, whereas in 2008's outing he was this almost autistic, eccentric, aristocratic jester, this time he was, for want of a better phrase a bit Emo.

Don't get me wrong here, I enjoyed this film immensely with so many nods to the mythology of the Marvel Universe and the wonderful semi reveal at the (VERY) end it was great fun. I won't go into the nods because, frankly they are the best bits of the film and the parts that probably kept me hooked in to the films jittery pace. Mickey Rourke was as intense as he was in the wrestler (in my opinion) and a very formidable foe, at least in his reveal at the race track. Scarlet Johannson's character was completely pointless, to have a single character that built up throughout the story for the sake of a pretty lame gag was a waste of a huge amount of screen time that could have been given to an actor with some real chops, in my honest opinion that was negligent to say the very least.

There was plenty of CG which was pretty nice, Casting my mind back the first one was very heavy on the CG, but it did teeter on the razor's edge, it nearly did what this did and that was go too far into the realm of robot wars.

I think my biggest complaint was, that there was very little humour in this film. Let's not forget that Iron man appeared before The Dark Knight in 2008 so the world had yet to be introduced to just how bleak the superhero movie could go and how "not ridiculous" these stories can be. Iron Man though had a campness about it that was lacking in this tale. Marvel's Iron man Comics were serious, I get it. Tony was a very serious character buried behind bravado and where comics have years to build up the Mythology, the movies have had a little over four hours in total. You have to cram it all in. I can forgive that, but that doesn't mean that other characters can't be sucked in to Tony's Ego and believe him to be impenetrable. Keep Pepper out of this equation as it's her job to be his quote unquote "wife" in the story but how snivelling was Don Cheadle's Roadie? We just didn't NEED that many people fluffing around Tony Stark. Nick Fury, Natalie, Roadie, Pepper Potts even the bloody Computer was whining at him. With that many Nay sayers around you it must be hard to take a dump let alone save the world from killer robots.

This film wasn't so much a case of Iron Man versus "cliche" bad guy but Tony Stark versus his friends and it's for that element of the story that I think Iron Man 2 lets its predecessor down, not that this is a bad film, but it really isn't a patch on the tight storytelling of the first instalment. The thing that REALY raped the story was the fact that the baddies were outnumbered and outgunned from the moment they entered the frame. Tony Stark was not for a second in that film made vulnerable, he was always surrounded in a bubble "of Love" from his friend's who kept protecting him. Even his dead father was around to help him.

There were two bad guys in this movie, one was pussy and the other was really only hard in the same way that Tony Stark is tough, with a robot suit that's impregnable unless he's completely outgunned by The good guys.

There were hundreds of good guys in this film. two in robot suits, one who's "the man" one who's supposed to be pretty and deadly and about fifty other sidekicks. With odds like that even an idiot chav heavily intoxicated by white lightning cider knows to avoid getting involve let alone someone as smart as a physicist whose father helped Howard Stark create Arc technology. I think Rourke did the best with what he was given and to be honest he was the best part of the whole film.

For Rourke's performance and the nods to the Marvel mythology this was a great film, it didn't quite meet my expectations and the bad guys never really had a chance of winning and the last battle seemed a little rushed in the edit. Still I like Iron man and was a pretty good romp.