Iron Man 2 (2010)

There's a scene fairly early in Iron Man 2 where you realise, with a sinking feeling, that nothing particularly interesting is going to happen. The energy that made the first film so enjoyable, that crackling sense of something new being built, has simply evaporated. What's left is two hours of noise, colour, and very little substance.

I loved Iron Man. It was sharp, funny, and it had a genuine sense of purpose. The sequel carries none of that momentum forward. Instead it staggers around, lurching from one underdeveloped subplot to the next, and by the time the credits roll you're left wondering what the film was actually trying to be. A story about a man reckoning with his own mortality? A geopolitical thriller about weapons technology? An extended trailer for future Marvel releases? It attempts all three and lands none of them.

That last point is probably where my frustration is sharpest. There's a palpable sense throughout that the filmmakers are far more interested in planting seeds for other stories than they are in telling this one. Characters arrive, do their bit for the wider universe, and disappear again. Whole sequences feel like they belong in a different film entirely, one we haven't been invited to watch yet. It's franchise building dressed up as storytelling, and the difference matters.

And then there's Mickey Rourke. Cast as the film's central villain, he deserved so much better than what he was given. There's a flicker of something genuinely menacing in his early scenes, a coiled, weathered intensity that promises real danger. But the script never follows through on it. He's sidelined, underwritten, and when the final confrontation eventually arrives it's over so quickly you'd be forgiven for blinking and missing it entirely. A villain is only as good as the threat they pose, and this one poses almost none.

The action sequences are fine, technically competent in the way that Marvel films reliably are, but competence isn't the same as excitement. I sat through the big set pieces feeling remarkably little. Compare that to the third act of the original, where I was properly gripped, and the drop-off is stark. There's spectacle here, sure, but spectacle without stakes is just wallpaper.

What makes it all the more deflating is the waste of goodwill. The cast is genuinely talented, and there are moments, fleeting ones, where the film's charm threatens to reassert itself. But they're buried under the bloat. For every scene that earns a laugh or generates a bit of warmth, there are three more that feel like contractual obligations being fulfilled.

I've sat through plenty of Marvel films that don't quite work. Avengers: Age of Ultron (2015) has a similar problem with overstuffing, trying to carry too many plates at once and dropping most of them. But even that film has sequences of genuine spectacle and weight. Iron Man 2 doesn't even manage that. It's messy in a dull way, which is arguably worse than being messy in an interesting one.

One and a half stars. A real missed opportunity, and easily one of the weakest entries in the Marvel catalogue. If you want to see what this character is actually capable of, go back to the beginning. The first film holds up. This one feels like an afterthought someone spent two hundred million dollars on.

Rating: ★½  | Year: 2010  | Watched: 2025-04-18

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