As far as comic book movies go, the Iron Man series is by far the best Hollywood has done.  Some of you might cry foul pointing at the new Batman movies, but Batman Begins and The Dark Knight are just too high cinema to put them in the same realm.  It’s more that Christopher Nolan took a comic book hero and placed him in a dramatic/action movie.  With that qualification set, let’s look at just how good Iron Man 2 really is.

Whiplash premieres at the Monaco race track. Guess who wins? Yep, Tony with a suitcase Iron Man suit.

The beginning of the film opens with an introduction to our main bad guy (Ivan Vanko/Whiplash played by the amazing Mickey Rourke) watching part of the press release where Stark reveals himself as the Iron Man.  Rourke does a phenomenal job in his role, he may not have a ton of screen time or lines but if you’ve never seen him act before, you get an idea of just how good this man is at his profession.  This is a man that can steal a scene with ease.  Sam Rockwell plays co-baddie Justin Hammer.  Where Rourkes character stays quiet, Hammer tends to talk too much.  I’ve never enjoyed two evil doers interacting as much as these two did.  Rockwell is also a great actor whose showcased his talent wonderfully in Moon and even lives up to the bar he set for himself.

Robert Downey Jr. stays true to the first film, prideful, arrogant and witty through the entire movie.  If Tony Stark were real, he wouldn’t be able to play himself any better.  The big surprise was the cast change of Lt. Col. James Rhodes from Terrance Howard to Don Cheadle.  I wasn’t a big fan of Howard in the first film and was glad to see an upgrade in talent to Cheadle (who has acted amazingly in the past).  The big downfall was that they under utilized him, and left him feeling more shallow than some of the other supporting cast and wasn’t given a chance to do better.

So, good acting right?  What about the story?  Well, director/producer Jon Favreau and writer Justin Theroux (who you’d most easily recognize as the evil DJ in Zoolander) played it like Michael Jordan and Scotty Pippin.  Initial impressions waiting for the egg at the end of the credits brought a nagging suspicion to the surface.  This is probably one of the few sequels (especially in the comic realm) that is better than the first.  Having watched several clips prior to walking into the theater, fear was present in how this movie might play out, but thankfully it was all pulled together very well and allowed me to feel this movie was actually more believable than the first.  In the prior movie, there were several plot elements and action sequences that stretched my movie going imagination.  Perhaps that is easily seen after multiple viewings, yet IM2 seemed to try harder to keep the ball rolling and not fall into a semi-coagulated mess.  Suffice it to say, it is definitely worth multiple viewings in the theater.

The conflict and resolutions fit, each set-up had a better than average way of paying off.  Except there were a couple of forced scenes, like Scarlett Johansson taking out some security guards.  Though I doubt some of those stuntmen minded having their head between her thighs.  The cinematography fell a little short as well, it kept us in the story without getting confused (Transformers 2 anyone?) but it didn’t showcase the many aspects of this film that would have made it more beautiful.  That’s kind of confusing, since Matthew Libatique was the cinematographer on both movies and the first one seemed to give us a better picture (literally) of the suits while the second almost ignored them all together.   Perhaps this was an attempt to showcase the story and characters more than anything, but when you have such cool stuff on screen, why not show it off?

This movie hit the stride with the opening credits, giving us a voice over of the famous press conference.  The length of its step may have shortened in a few parts but it goes much further than pretty much all the comic book movies out there.  All-in-all Iron Man 2 was a great start to what appears to be a mediocre summer blockbuster season.