Iron Man 2

There is only one hero who got two movies before the Avengers movie, but after the overwhelming success of the first Iron Man, who's complaining? Iron Man 2 came out in 2010, was directed by Jon Favreau again, and saw the return of Robert Downey Jr. and Gwyneth Paltrow to the rolls of Tony Stark and Pepper Potts. This movie picked right up from where the first one left off, gave Iron Man another fun adventure, and very strongly started steering everything toward an Avenger movie.

Once again, the producers of this movie worked around the lack of good Iron Man villains by combining several characters. The result was Ivan Vanko, who I absolutely loved. He was dirty, mean, ruthless, and brilliant — a true test for Iron Man. I also loved the Russian soundtrack during the beginning of the film. I just have a weakness for Russian stuff, and this movie exploited that. One point added.

The score will rise to a 7 with Tony's entrance to the Stark Expo. Pepper didn't kiss and toss his helmet like in the previews, but he still did jump out of a plane, fly around fireworks, and take off his armor to show he'd been wearing a tuxedo underneath the whole time. This was fun, but more importantly, it showed that Tony Stark was still going to be fun. I was a little worried that he'd be boring and responsible, but this scene put those fears to rest.

Sadly, I have to take a point off for the new Rhodey. It wasn't anybody's fault, it's just that Don Cheadle was not nearly as entertaining as Terrence Howard. This wouldn't have been so bad if Rhodey didn't have such a large role in this movie and became War Machine.

If you thought that was unfair for me to take a point for that, then I'll add one for the race car scene, which will probably go down as one of the best scenes in superhero movie history. Vanko was sublime, slowly walking on the track, destroying cars left and right. I also liked how Stark tried to fight him until Happy and Pepper brought him the portable Iron Man suit, which in itself was innovative. Just a really, really cool scene.

In the late '70s, Iron Man became an important comic book character when he discovered he was an alcoholic, so it was really nice to see a little bit of that here. Of course, Tony was mostly pretending, so he could get Rhodey to put the suit on and take care of things after he died, but I liked that aspect, too. The score is now an 8.

I'll add one final point for the set up for the Avengers movie. We got a lot of Nick Fury, Agent Coulson, and were introduced to Black Widow (who actually kind of annoyed me, but oh well). We also had some secretive clues about something happening in New Mexico ... hmmm ...

I can't add another point because the final battle was just a little anti-climatic. I loved Vanko until he put on the giant suit, which was a little too reminiscent of Obadiah Stane. And then once he got the suit on, he was beaten in like two seconds. Couldn't he have fought them for a little bit longer? And also, in the end, I couldn't give this movie the same score as Iron Man because it's just not as good as the first one. It's a great movie, just not a 10.

Final score: 9 out of 10.