Film

You’d think that, having conquered the comic-book superhero movie world, Iron Man could cruise through a sequel with jaunty confidence. But for whatever reason, Iron Man 2 seems overly anxious about keeping our attention, moving with ADHD impatience. The movie’s enjoyable enough but oddly exhausting, frantic to re-create the charms of the first film. Downey seems particularly hyper, tossing off asides so fast you’ll probably need to see the film twice just to catch all his zingers. (But perhaps that’s the point; Tony Stark knows how to maximize profit, and so does Favreau.) It’s a blessing that the movie comes in at just more than two hours, but at this clip, the emotional stuff and the rest stops between action sequences get short shrift. (Stark has to deal with dying from palladium poisoning, daddy issues and a drinking problem, all dashed through so fast you have to admire his therapist.) This time around, Stark’s dickish self-regard and playboy ways, so endearing in the first film, start to wear out their welcome. When he mocks a congressional committee and declares “I’ve privatized world peace,” it’s hard not to think of the arrogance of CEOs singing the praises of the free market.

But you don’t care about those sorts of nuances, do you? It’s Iron Man 2, dude. You want to see shit blow up and Stark strut around like cock of the walk between video-game battles. You’ll get that, plus a lot of comic-book inside jokes and lumbering setup work for the coming Avengers franchise. Jackson’s Nick Fury seems impatient to get on with it and get a movie of his own, where he has more to do than deliver cryptic hints about S.H.I.E.L.D. As Russian baddie Ivan Vanko, Rourke hams it up, glowering and sneering and using an accent so thick it sounds as if he has marbles in his mouth.

Favreau does a fair but not great job with the action, often cluttering things so much that you can’t work out who’s hitting whom. It’s not a Transformers 2 level of incoherence, but we couldn’t help thinking that the climactic battle royal, and in fact the whole film, should have been more awesome and less noisy.