I am honestly afraid to write this review. This is sacred ground, er, film, we’re talking about. How could anyone but Dan the Man write this review? Opinions about the new installment in the Iron Man franchise are as common and prevalent as PB and J sandwiches in an elementary school lunchroom. That’s a daunting thought for me at first. And then I realize that nobody in elementary school cared about my PB and J sandwich. They were all busy eating their own. I suspect this review will be the same way. I will, in fact, be surprised if anyone even reads it. Iron Man 2 is one of those movies that everyone is going to go see regardless of what anyone else says. I think that’s a good thing.

It’s becoming a rule that Iron Man movies have to open in a country that’s not America. I’d complain about the overuse of Russian and Middle-Eastern stereotypes for villains but it isn’t really anybody’s fault, given that the Marvel Universe has been around a while. Villain choices are also often fueled by current events and therefore typically prone to the use of stereotypes and representations of whoever America was at war with when the latest issue rolled out. All of this comes to a single conclusion: Mickey Rourke does a mind-blowing job as Ivan Vanko/Whiplash. It’s been a while since a comic book movie has served up a villain unique and compelling enough to care about and sinister enough to love hating. As far as the cast of Iron Man 2 is concerned, I had little doubt that everyone would do at least a moderately good job. I had only a few concerns, and most of those proved irrelevant.

Robert Downey Jr. did exactly as well as anybody who has seen the first Iron Man (e.g. everyone who owns a television plus a few people who sat around in Wal-Mart all day when they were using it to show off televisions) would expect him to. What’s impressive is that he didn’t carry the movie the way he did the first go-around. That’s not to say that he wasn’t good, he just had a lot of excellent support. Think Kevin Garnett as a part of the Boston Threeparty rather than a lone Timberwolf. For those of us not as inclined to NBA metaphors, I’m saying that RDJ simply didn’t have to outshine everyone else to make this a movie.

I will be the first (and possibly only) to admit that I was a little nervous about Don Cheadle replacing Terrance Howard. I absolutely hate when an actor or actress is traded out in the middle of a franchise and we are asked not to notice. What if Matt Damon had suddenly been Aragorn in The Return of the King? Extreme scenarios aside, I think the point has been made: don’t mess with me once I’ve adjusted. Howard was a great fit for that role and I was a little skeptical about Cheadle’s relaxed delivery style being the proper replacement for the fast-talking, loyal Lt. Col James “Rhodey” Rhodes. I may be marooning myself by saying this, but at times I feel I was justified. I really wasn’t completely sold on Cheadle as an Air Force officer. But those times were few and far between as Rhodey delivered scene after scene. Scenes involving RDJ and Cheadle playing off of each other are truly a pleasure to watch, especially during his first combat as War Machine, wherein some very entertaining dialogue involving the difference between “a big gun” and “the big gun” takes place.

So War Machine was great, Mickey Rourke blew my mind into tiny pieces that he reassembled and blew up again with an arc reactor, RDJ was fantastic as expected, and the rest of the cast was pretty much unchanged. Any problems here? Not really. Samuel L. Jackson did his usual odd bit as Nick Fury and managed not to distract me too much, the interplay between Tony Stark and Pepper Potts (Gwenyth Paltrow) was up to and beyond par, and new rival Justin Hammer (Sam Rockwell) managed to keep a perfect balance between “amusingly eccentric” and “fascinatingly evil.” Those of you going over the checklist at home will note that I’ve covered every base but one: That empty box next to “Introduction of Black Widow” is screaming for attention, isn’t it?

Ok, I’ll say it. She wasn’t bad. I mean that. I even went in expecting it to be your typical Hollywood “insert-random-attractive-actress-in-seemingly-unnecessary-role-in-order-to-attract-male-audience” maneuver. Honestly, they probably didn’t actually need Black Widow (who, like War Machine, is never actually identified by anything other than her alter-ego’s name and the occasional alias… now that I think about it, did we ever actually call Ivan Vanko “Whiplash?” No, actually. Clearly Marvel knows their target audience.). Parenthetical rants aside, I came in with a point. Scarlett Johansson was a relatively unimportant and under-characterized piece of eye candy. But not distractingly so. There were a few points where she felt out of place, where she was clearly trying too hard to fit into the relatively unfamiliar role of a super spy. Please, Scarlett, don’t try to act tough. If your character is tough, then be tough. You aren’t really fooling anybody simply by replacing your normal voice with a growl when you get angry, and they already made a Hulk movie. For the most part, though, Johansson did a good job of blending into the admittedly ludicrous and complex world of Marvel superheroes, a theme which Iron Man 2 pushed to its limit.

I realize that we’re building up for The Avengers, I really do (stick around after the credits for a brief glimpse of what’s to come, as usual). The Avenger Initiative was just a little too central for me. This script had a lot of cool ideas and subplots, from the mysterious work of Tony’s father to the background of disgruntled scientist Ivan Vanko with stops along the way to include Tony’s personal life, the disturbing truth about what wearing a high-energy device in your chest cavity can do to your health, the birth of an awesome partnership between Iron Man and War Machine, and the future of a powerful weapons and technology industry. I don’t really think we needed S.H.E.I.L.D. as much as they were involved. I feel like there was a bit of laziness in the writing room whenever the script hit a roadblock and the standard fallback was “and then Nick Fury said…” There was a lot going on in this film, and I wish it could have been slightly more focused, but the overall effect was still dazzling.

But Marvel truly is aiming at a specific target audience. As a bit of a geek with Friends in Nerd Places, I enjoyed the casual references dropped throughout the film (keep an eye out for Captain America’s shield, it’s not hard to miss this time around). I don’t mind being made to jump through increasingly strenuous imagination hoops to follow a storyline, and I really didn’t have to as much as I could have. God help us when the alternate universes get involved. I pray they never do. What I’m getting at here is that Iron Man 2 could be a bit difficult to digest. But so are 87% of the items on an American menu. That doesn’t make them not worth eating.

Related posts:

1. Steven’s View: Kick-Ass Review
2. Steven’s View: Prince of Persia Review
3. Steven’s View: The Crazies Review
4. Steven’s View: Repo Men Review
5. Loads Of Iron Man 2 Images