My Review of Iron Man 2 (2010)

 

Written by Justin Theroux

Directed by Jon Favreau 

Tony: "My bond is with the people, and I will serve this great nation at the pleasure of myself. If there's one thing I've proven it's that you can count on me to pleasure myself."

Those early MCU days really were a wild time. To think the first three movies focus on two Iron Man movies and a solo Hulk adventure with the slow build up towards The Avengers. Ah, yes, I'm reviewing the first sequel in the MCU, which also happened to be it's third entry.

Once again, there was the return of Toby Stark aka Iron Man (Robert Downey Jr) and he was largely showboating his newfound responsibilities to the consternation of both girlfriend Pepper Potts (Gwyneth Paltrow) and best friend, Rhodey (Don Cheadle). In fact both were just about done with Tony until they weren't.

For Pepper, she was basically running Stark Industries to the point that Tony made her CEO and with that came a lot of outside scrutiny that she also had to deal. There's a few times in the movie where it did look like she was going to throw in the towel with Tony when she wasn't saving his backside.

Similarly Rhodes has taken enough and when the latter was acting too hedonistic, Rhodes literally became War Machine to try and knock some sense into him. That didn't work. Neither did Rhodes allying with rival Justin Hammer (Sam Rockwell).

Let's talk about Justin Hammer. He wanted to beat Tony at his own game and even stole some of Tony's technology to nearly accomplish that. More importantly was his alliance with the real villain of the piece - Ivan Vanko/Whiplash (Mickey Rourke). 

Villain wise, both Hammer and Whiplash have their moments and did make for decent foils against Iron Man and War Machine. Oh and this was the very movie to debut Natasha Romanoff aka Black Widow (Scarlett Johansson). She's part of S.H.I.E.L.D. working with Nick Fury (Samuel L. Jackson) and while she would be better served in future MCU movies, it's a reasonably good debut for the character.

- The credit scene of the movie had Agent Colson (Clark Gregg) locating Thor's hammer.

- Jump scare moment with Elon Musk's cameo and that exchange between him and Tony was cringe in its writing and delivery.

- Stan Lee got mistook for Larry King in this one and Christine Everhart (Leslie Bibb) and JARVIS (Paul Bettany) also appear/are heard.

- Happy Hogan (Jon Favreau) had some great scenes with Black Widow throughout the movie.

- Standout music: AC/DC's Guns For Hire.

- Chronology: A year since the events of the first movie.

Though not quite as good as the first movie, I do think Iron Man 2 at least wasn't a really divisive sequel and for it's introduction of Black Widow, it does merit points. Saying that, Tony did push his reckless streak almost too far here.

Rating: 7 out of 10