Iron Man 2 Review

This is the film where the machinery became visible. Somewhere in the second act it stops being a story about a man dying of his own power source and becomes a delivery vehicle for a briefcase full of future movies, and it never recovers the thread. Mickey Rourke is genuinely alarming for one sequence, walking onto the Monaco circuit and opening a moving car like a tin, and Sam Rockwell's Justin Hammer is the sharpest comic performance of the early run, a mediocrity who cannot stop selling.

The problem is everything in between. Tony's palladium poisoning is set up as a death sentence and resolved by inventing a new element in an afternoon using his father's model train set, which is the laziest beat in the phase by a wide margin. Scarlett Johansson is introduced as a costume long before she is a character. The drunken birthday party means to show a man falling apart and lands as an unpleasant detour. The finale, drones exploding in a Queens garden, carries no stakes whatsoever. Favreau is a warm director stuck servicing a corporate schedule, and you can feel him losing the argument.