Just when I was convinced that Ozzy was Iron Man, along came Robert Downey Jr. And the first Iron Man movie really kicked butter.  It would be hard to top, and sure enough  installment 2 of this Marvel Comic hits the big screen enterprise does not measure up as well.  There is less good dialogue, less one liners,  less plot,  more explosions and did I mention less plot?  Its too bad since both Downey Jr. and Gwen Paltrow are admirably suited to their roles.  

Was anything really gained by bringing in Don Cheadle to play Rhody?   I love Don Cheadle but this was not his finest hour, playing a very subdued version of Officer Rhodes.  What about the additions of Mickey Rourke and Scarlet Johansson?  Well Rourke makes an excellent villain and his Russian accent is not as unbelievable as some.  And he has those cool electrical whiplash things.  The problem is he spends too little time doing anything and too much time behind the scenes: 1) in jail, or 2) in a lab cogitating, or 3) in a room stroking his bird. 

Johansson is not wasted altogether and has a wonderful action sequence towards the end of the movie, but on the whole she does not add much to the plot or story line.  And then there is Samuel L. Jackson, playing badass Nick Fury.  His performance I liked better, but there is too little of it.   And as for the guy who was the CEO of Hammer, Stark Industries rival company, I’d rather watch M.C. Hammer singing ‘hammer time’.  And what of the addition of footage of Howard Stark, the father of Tony and founder of the company?  Well more could have been done with that as well in a nearly two hour movie.  Even Tony can’t muster a tear when he father on celluloid says ‘my greatest creation was you’. 

What I did like about the portrayal of party hardy Stark in this movie is we saw a little vulnerability considering the battery pack in his chest is slowly poisoning him.  The discovery of a new element was rather cool— it should be called  Antonium, and of course the computer graphics and the suit are still very cool.  The problem for a producer of such a film is that comic books are short, and so you have to cobble together several story lines from several magazines, or write a whole new script to have enough material.  Maybe that explains using too much blowing things up as filler a few too many times.  There is probably too much violence in this movie for smaller children.  

The future of Stark industries may not be in doubt, but whether the Iron Man movie cycle has run its course already remains to be seen.  The ending of this movie suggests there will be more, perhaps even a real romance between Tony and Pepper, but the stark realities for now are that this movie probably did not do enough to justify its continued existence.  And dat’s all I can say about dat.