drwex | Iron Man 2 was OK. Sort of.

But just OK. Except for Scarlett Johansson who, as Natalie Rushman / Natasha Romanoff pretty completely stole the scenes she was in. I want one.

Sequels rarely live up to their predecessors. Unless you're following up on a stinker like Star Trek there's often a high bar and set of expectations the sequel isn't going to live up to. Thus falls Iron Man - it had all the trappings of the original movie and almost none of the spirit.

Yes, there's an Iron Man suit in a suitcase. Yes, there are multiple Iron Mans in action at once - major props to Don Cheadle, whose part and performance are in every way a step up from the first film. His character has lost all the buffoonery from the first film and we take him as seriously as we need to in order to have him be a man in an Iron Man suit. Unlike Samuel L Jackson as Nick Fury who seems to have no purpose in this film and no idea how he wants to play the character. He's almost as much of a throw-away as Agent Coulson who both shows up and then disappears for no conceivable reason.

Yes, there are good special effects. And to the film's credit they don't let the effects dominate. Sadly, the script just isn't up to filling the gaps. Let's leave off the trite dead-father plot bit and just focus on how badly the main plot does... well, everything. Tony Stark/Pepper Potts' relationship should have been front and center. Instead it seems to come and go almost at random. The villains are just downright AWFUL. Sam Rockwell really drew the short straw - his character gets abused from every direction and can't even make a simple gun, yet we're supposed to believe he's some kind of mastermind? Evil genius? Something? Please, get him out of here before he embarrasses himself further.

Mickey Rourke has a more believable Russian accent than I do but that's really the only thing believable about him. What is this guy's motivation? He's a brilliant Russian physicist/hacker with evil mafia connections and the best thing he can come up with is a pair of oversized electric bullwhips and a bunch of booby-trapped robots that (dear lords preserve us from cliche') beep and blink red lights when they're about to explode? No, I'm sorry, this guy just blew the bogometer right out of the water.

And while I'm on the subject of stupid blinking bombs, whose idiotic script idea was it to have Paltrow just stand still and (dear lord I don't believe they made her do this) squeak when she realized there was a bomb at her feet? No excuse. Run, at least!

Oh, wait, she can't run because some IMBECILE put her in atrocious heels. That would (according to IMDB) be Mary Zophres who should be sentenced to sit and watch the costume design that Rebecca Bentjen and Laura Jean Shannon did for the first movie. And then watch it again, until she weeps at her obvious inadequacies. In the first Iron Man, Gwyneth Paltrow was smokin' hot and had the wardrobe for it. The dresses were elegant and well-cut. Her business attire was chic and stylish. This time around we have not only Paltrow but Scarlett Johansson sewn into awful tight skirts and stuffed into ridiculously high heels that no self-respecting lawyer or CEO would wear to any office or public gathering.

Yes, I get that part of what makes Johansson's character work is that cleavage. And her character is take-my-breath-away... wow. But what makes her *wow* is that she's smart, gorgeous, and KICKS MAJOR ASS. Not that she's tramped up to the point where she really can't even walk properly up a flight of stairs.

I would guess that the film does this because they're trying to appeal to the "guy" audience. Except they seem to have forgotten what guys like me found so awesome in the first movie - the ups and downs of hard experiment and failing in interesting ways and learning from those failures and coming out with something kick-ass at the end. I also cannot begin to discuss the awfulness of the physics and the one scene of real tech hackery in the film because if I do I'll start to feel nauseous. Inventing a new element? Really? That's the best you can come up with? Please, at least hire Mr. Science or something next time (and you can bet there will be a next time given how much dough this thing is raking in).

I have to steal a term from rednikki who called this "not Iron Man but Iron Meh". Right on.

Hmm, apparently I had more of a rant in me than I thought when I first started.