REVIEW: 'Iron Man 2' Is Only Good Enough

Imagine the pressure of pulling off the perfect film — then immediately being expected to top yourself. That was pretty much the situation faced by Robert Downey Jr. and director Jon Favreau with “Iron Man.”

When that superhero flew into theaters in 2008, he brought the thrill of discovery back to moviegoers who had been hit throughout the decade with a wave of Spiderman, X-Men and Superman movies. With Downey Jr. taking on the lead role of super-industrialist and weapons maker Tony Stark, that film’s producers took a big chance on giving one of Hollywood’s most legendary bad boys another shot at stardom after he had wasted years of great reviews on a personal ride through a drug-addicted hell complete with time in a hard-core prison and repeated attempts at rehab.

Audiences went wild for him, as Downey brought genuine emotion, sass and swagger to his role at the heart of the expertly mounted film, which featured Terence Howard, Jeff Bridges and Gwyneth Paltrow in key supporting roles.

That story was launched with a gritty sequence in the Middle East in which Stark escaped Arabic terrorists by creating a crude prototype for our hero, thus grounding the fantastic yarn in a sense of real-world good and evil.

The first film also had the emotional weight of Bridges’ character, Obediah Stane, who was both a mentor and father figure to Stark, running his Stark Industries, yet ultimately turning on his younger boss when Tony felt the need to stop crafting weapons and start fighting for world peace. The resulting finale’s Ironmano a Ironmano battle royale not only shook the screen with spectacular effects, but also registered on a genuinely human level.

With “Iron Man 2,” Favreau returns with Downey and Paltrow (as his assistant and ever-pining friend Pepper Potts) and Don Cheadle taking Howard’s place as Stark’s best friend, Lt. Col. James “Rhodey” Rhodes. The villain this time is played by Mickey Rourke in his first role since his Oscar-nominated comeback in ‘The Wrestler.” Here, Rourke’s still sporting a seemingly juiced-up physique, which brings an immediate sense of foreboding to his character, a disgruntled Russian physicist named Ivan Vanko.

Vanko wants to avenge his father, who developed Iron Man’s power source with Tony’s father, but died in squalor and was never credited for his work. However, it’s not long before Rourke’s Vanko becomes an oversized but poorly developed one-note monster.

Vanko’s goal is to invent his own version of Iron Man in order to fight and kill Stark. But when Stark’s defense-contractor competitor Justin Hammer (Sam Rockwell) lures Vanko to work with him on developing a competing weapons-based suit for the Pentagon, Rourke opts instead to create an army of droids. At this point, the plot falls into a rather long and listless stretch in which the audience is left waiting for the film’s admittedly entertaining finale.

“Iron Man 2” amps up the special effects machinery in its key action sequences — including the jaw-dropping showdown between Vanko and Stark on a Monte Carlo race track. And Downey is once again solid, veering from a hilarious televised showdown against a slimy senator played by veteran comic Garry Shandling to effectively conveying Stark’s fear over the fact that the radioactive device that’s keeping him alive is also poisoning him.

Justin Theroux, who wrote this script solo after his co-writing debut with Ben Stiller on “Tropic Thunder,” seems an odd choice for inventing the movie’s plot. The first movie had four writers, yet possessed more of a cohesive feel than Theroux’s often-exhausting mishmash of plot devices and characters (including a new double agent named Black Widow portrayed by Scarlett Johannsen, who alternately has too little or too much to do). Worst of all is that Rourke isn’t given much to do beyond scowling and fighting in a distinctly less compelling way than Bridges’ Stane.

In the end, “Iron Man 2” is good enough. But following the first film, good enough is still a bit disappointing.