With great power, comes shitty sequels.

I took the day off work to take the boy to see Iron Man 2 for his birthday. He was all Iron Manned up and we were both really excited to see the movie. It's hard to believe that I could be dissapointed with a super hero movie that featured a little known Beastie Boy song, from my favorite record of all time and the Chicago White Sox adopted AC/DC fist-pumper "Thunderstruck", but here we are. Most of the action was visually tantalizing and slick , but I felt like they wrote the screenplay around the scenes they outlined. I think they thought more about the forthcoming sequels, and setting up for the Avengers. I know it’s a superhero movie, and I have no problem suspending disbelief, but it drives me nuts when irrational things happen in a movie. They wanted a battle scene with Iron Man vs. Whiplash at a race Track at Monaco, so:

SPOILERS:

We see Whiplash get the fake ID & tickets to Monaco; he was going there to attack Stark. Was Whip planning on attacking Tony Stark in the skybox where he was supposed to be? Doesn’t seem like it as Whip disguised himself as a pit crew member for the attack. Problem is, Tony made a last minute decision to drive his race car. They even show the ESPN style coverage scratch the expected driver and replace him with Stark. Everybody was shocked that Tony was going to drive, except Whiplash who we see planning the attack in Moscow.

That didn’t make sense.

I still don’t understand the whole thing where Tony’s father left him clues in the model to create some new element to save his life. Tony’s dad knew he would one day have this strange heart ailment and he would need this info to save himself?

Whacky.

I had a lot of problems with the events in this movie.

Apparently, pc security sucks in the Marvel Universe and everyone is an expert hacker. Whiplash hacks Hammer's government weapons contractor mainframe in about 5 seconds, then Black Widow hacks into what Whip was doing with the same ease. A shield agent was able to break into Tony's system and easily 'cut him off from communication with the outside world'. I guess he just disabled Firefox or something. So Tony walks around his pad swiping the air and manipulating everything and he doesn't have a wifi account somewhere? Maybe he can add that in his Mach V armor for part 3. I still don't understand why Shield found it necessary to cut him off from the outside world. A shield agent is able to hold Iron Man under house arrest with the threat of a taser? The ending bored the shit out of me too. It seemed like War Machine and the drones were chasing Iron Man for about 20 minutes, and then there was a very short final battle with a weak pay-off. At least we were treated with the fart sound effect when the bunker buster missile didn't work. Whiplash must be psychic because he absolutely seemed to know that missile was going to fail. Uh oh, Whiplash has set all of the drones to self-destruct. Iron Man (a) Knows, somehow that Pepper is in danger as she stands motionless next to a droid that is ominously beeping (b) Knows exactly where she is (c) Only has seconds to saves her, and easily does (d) All of the ridiculous statements above are true. I'm not one of these nerds who are going to be overly critical of casting choices but Sam Jackson is a terrible Nick Fury, I keep waiting for him to throw a mother fucker or two in there. You know you are in trouble when people would rather see Hasslehoff don the eye patch.





END SPOILERS:

I can't believe they killed off War Machine, bad decision. Oh wait, that was a spoiler. - EDIT (Move above with spoliers)
Staying for the surprise after the credits was a waste of time too.

I like most everything Jon Favreau has done, but I get the feeling he has grown complacent with the success of the first one. IM 1 was smart, charming, and realistic, especially for a superhero movie. I think Favreau and crew (writers) put forth a lackluster effort knowing how successful IM2 would be. It’s not a terrible movie, but with the strong cast (more Scarlett J in the skin tight body suit please) and the momentum from the IM 1, it was very disappointing.