Iron Man 2 is the perfect way to kick off the summer of 2010 movie season which, frankly, is something I didn’t anticipate I’d be saying. Why? Because the trailers for Iron Man 2 turned me off. Love Robert Downey Jr and I gave the first Iron Man movie a B+, but the trailers for Iron Man 2 lacked the humor of the first film. In its place the trailers served up what appeared to be battling robots. All I could think was, “Is this a teaser for an Iron Man movie or Transformers 3?” However, those trailers were completely misleading and, thankfully, Iron Man 2 is as good as its predecessor – and in some ways even better.And here’s the deal, my other worry was that Iron Man 2 would just be used to set-up The Avengers and that the story would suffer from doing so. This was a case of hearing too much about a film before seeing it. Where normally I pay no attention to advance reviews – I, like I assume most critics do, refuse to read any reviews before I write my own – it was impossible to escape the blurbs declaring this a filler between the first Iron Man and the 2012 release of The Avengers. And because I know nothing – I repeat, nothing – about the source material other than what I’ve learned from the film adaptations, I figured I’d be completely lost watching a movie loaded with references comic book fans would understand but that would go right over my head. Wrong again. Iron Man 2 does set-up The Avengers, but it does so in an unobtrusive, oh by the way manner that’s organically woven into the story. There’s a reason Nick Fury (Samuel L Jackson) is in Iron Man 2, and it’s not just Avengers-related.
So if you, like I, were worried that as a person who doesn’t read comic books Iron Man 2 was going to let you down, relax. Iron Man 2 delivers the goods, and the action/CGI – my chief complaint about the first movie – is infinitely better this time around. It’s like night and day, and in fact the robots surrounding Iron Man and War Machine scene from the trailer turned out to be one of my favorites.
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