Robert Downey Jr. brings his mumbly narcissism back to the franchise about a superhero who is in love with his powers. This time he has to fight off U.S. government interference, as well as a rival, a Russian (Mickey Rourke) with his own superhero suit. The battle of the robots is inevitable, but inside this, there's a screwball romance that's fast-paced and funny.
Starring: Robert Downey Jr., Mickey Rourke, Gwyneth Paltrow, Scarlett Johansson
Rating: Four stars out of five
The first time we see Iron Man in the pyrotechnically smartass sequel Iron Man 2, he's wearing his red metal suit and jumping out of an airplane to an appropriate soundtrack: heavy metal music.
Iron Man is headed to a trade show that's all about him, an expo devoted to Tony Stark, the industrialist-scientist who is Iron Man's inventor. Once on stage, Stark struts and prances, a man in love with his superpowers. Behind him, a line of sexy dancers gyrates.
Welcome to the age of the unabashed superhero: with great power comes great women. Leave the angst to Spider-Man. This is a hero who revels in heroism.
It helps that Stark is played by Robert Downey Jr., whose mumbly air of wounded confidence gives Iron Man a narcissistic charm that makes the franchise so appealing.
"It's good to be back," he says, and you get the sense that both the character and Downey Jr. are delighted to be on screen once more.
Since we last saw Iron Man - when he developed his so-called "high-tech prosthesis" to protect America - the inevitable has happened: the government wants in on the action.
Stark is called before a Senate committee to explain why he won't share his Iron Man technology with the Pentagon. His answer - "I have successfully privatized world peace" - covers pretty well all the ideological bases.
The dark cloud on the horizon comes in the person of Justin Hammer (Sam Rockwell), an oily arms dealer who has been trying to make an Iron Man suit of his own and is failing miserably.
Hammer is so oily that even the palms of his hands are suntanned - it's hard to know what this means, but there it is - and he finds his own champion in the person of Ivan Vanko (Mickey Rourke), a muscled and tattooed Russian who has a grudge against Stark ever since his father was fired from Stark Industries for trying to turn its weaponry into cash.
Vanko has developed his own suit, which comes with two electric whips that can slash race cars in half at the Monaco Grand Prix.
Watching the great, overwhelming bulk of Rourke sneering down the racetrack of that wealthy seaside tax haven, chopping at the air with his laser coils, is one of the iconic scenes of over-the-top villainy in the canon of superheroism.
It also makes it difficult to remember that Vanko is a physicist, an occupation that the movies have taken away from the likes of Albert Einstein - a man who couldn't bench-press a slide-rule - and given to the body-builders.
We realize at this point that a final Vanko-Stark showdown is just a matter of time because, like all such films, Iron Man 2 is a two-hour buildup to a battle between robots. This one occupies most of the final half-hour of the film and proves for once and for all that Jon Favreau, who helped define the new L.A. hipster in Swingers, has turned into a director who can blow things up.
Inside this adventure, however, screenwriter Justin Theroux has fashioned something unique. Iron Man 2 is also a fast-paced romance between Stark and his assistant, Pepper Potts (Gwyneth Paltrow), that is reminiscent of those 1940s screwball comedies where people talked over one another and the insults barely covered the affection below it.
When Stark sees the hot new assistant Natalie (played by Scarlett Johansson, who will eventually don a leather jumpsuit and take Iron Man to another level of iconography) he says, "I want one." "No," replies Pepper, almost before he's finished speaking.
The snappy dialogue sounds as if it is fashioned just for Downey Jr. but everyone gets to play. "Where are you from?," Stark asks the mysterious Natalie, and she says, "Legal."
There's a kind of verbal dexterity that's unusual in any film, let alone one with gun-mounted robots: Hammer describes a newfangled weapon as being so smart it could write a book, then adds, "a book that would make Ulysses look like it was written in crayon."
Yes, it's over the top, but so what? It's Iron Man.
