Iron Man 2

B+

We saw this recently with some friends at the Kerasotes (now AMC) Showplace ICON theater in Saint Louis Park. We had the VIP seating in the balcony (nice comfy chairs, tables, lottsa space and leg room). These seats are a bit more expensive than the regular admission seating and require reservations/pre-purchase, but they're worth it for the big-deal and/or long movies you really want to see in a theater.

Anyway, you've read the review we did for Iron Man last year. I have to say that IM2 suffers from some of the same problems. Bits of the movie are just plain too long and quite boring, some sections could probably have been left out as they lend not much to the movie over all, and my FAVORITE thing to pick on... scenes in the TV commercials and theater trailers were not in the actual movie (I really hate when studios do that).

Still, generic plot stuff: The son of a Russian scientist that Stark's father worked with years ago on the Arc Reactor (remember the first movie) either bought, stole or somehow acquired plans to the chest power source Tony uses to keep himself alive and power his armor. This guy (who for those familiar with the Marvel Universe is called Whiplash) builds his electric whip weapons and goes after Tony in Monaco at a car race. He fails cause Stark has a portable briefcase sized version of the armor and was able to beat Whiplash, who is arrested.

One of the sub-plots running through the movie is that Tony is slowly being poisoned by the very device keeping him alive, and he's been working on a new design without success. He takes some kind of drink he made up to stave off the effects of the heavy metal poisoning, but is still losing the fight.

Anyway, Whiplash gets out of jail and is hired on by one of Starks competitors who wants not only the power source, but armor suits of his own to sell to the military. Oh, somewhere in between the initial fight and these new suits being developed (remember how I said parts of it were too long?) Rhode's takes the Mark II suit (the silverish one) and hands it over to the Air Force, who in turn hand it off to this guy Hammer that's working with Whiplash now. They mod the heck out of the suit adding weapons and such and call it War Machine, which Rhodes still pilots.

Meanwhile, Stark continues thinking he's dead soon, and starts giving away his company (to Pepper) and tossing out compute files and papers and such, getting drunk and throwing parties.

He eventually discovers that the new element he needs to make a new power source that won't poison him was thought up by his father 20 or more years ago and left hidden in plain sight for Tony to find years later (which he does). Tony ends up creating this new element based on Dad's design and builds a new chest piece that miraculously not only gives him renewed strength gut heals him of the heavy metal poisoning as well, all with-in a few seconds.

Just in time, as Whiplash is taking over all these drones he built for Hammer, including the War Machine suit, and going after Iron Man again.

Big fight ensues, where whiplash dies, the drones are destroyed, Rhodes recovers and helps in the fight, and everyone that needs to live does so.

See? Pretty easy to sum up this movie. Provided I left out a couple people, and a bunch of junk that doesn't really matter to the story.

A good movie if you can get through the boring bits (and there are more than a couple) but worth seeing in the theater regardless if your a fan.

Oh, they find Thor's hammer in the desert of Nevada at the end of the movie (for the upcoming Avengers movie next year).

We did enjoy the movie, and we actually intend to see it again here soon, partly because we did enjoy it, partly because I started day-dreaming in parts of the movie and missed some bits (remember, boring bits). Still pretty good movie with quite a few funny bits thrown in.