Iron Man 2-It Doesn’t Suck

Sure, this article is a touch late: Iron Man 2 was released two weeks ago. But what else are you going to watch this weekend? MacGruber? (Actually, I probably am. So help me God, it’s getting good reviews, and I’m over the fact that Val Kilmer now looks like the long-lost little brother of those two fat twins on motorcycles and Kristen Wiig’s smile creeps the living hell out of me. Have you ever seen a woman look more uncomfortable on screen? It’s like she’s perpetually in the middle of a colonic.) For those of you that haven’t seen Iron Man 2, though, I’m here to tell you that, while it’s no masterpiece…well, it doesn’t suck, either.


Let’s get this out of the way: While I enjoyed the first Iron Man well enough, I don’t think I got nearly as much out of it as most people did. If memory serves, Robert Downey, Jr., fucks Ricky Bobby’s wife, gets abducted by terrorists, escapes and then ends up fighting The Big Lebowski, who seems a lot more Walter than Dude in his old age. I literally recall nothing beyond that. Maybe it’s not the film’s fault, because I had to scream at a bunch of kids every five minutes to shut up during the damn thing in the theater (I’m actually really confrontational…when my opponents are under 12 years old and white) and (paging Dr. Freud) I only seem to enjoy super hero flicks when the protagonist’s father figure meets an untimely end. I just couldn’t feel too much pathos for a character that was a rich, brilliant, charismatic and fucking everything on two legs. Is it too much to ask that the same incident that required Iron Man to live with the aid of a robot heart also left him using colostomy bags? I’d feel a lot more empathy for a guy who had to save the world while pooping into a sack taped to his chest. Just sayin’.

Iron Man 2 works because it manages to keep to a minimum the two problems that plague all super hero movie sequels: Multiple new villains and spending roughly seven hours of the film’s run time setting up a second sequel. IM2 does contain a few scenes with Samuel L. Jackson as Nick Fury to set the groundwork for a tie-in film (The Avengers), but come on: It’s godddamn Samuel L. Jackson. Had he told Iron Man to “strike down with great vengeance those who attempt to poison and destroy you,” I’d be nominating him for the Oscar. Mickey Rourke also does a very good job as Whiplash, the film’s (predominant) big bad. My only complaint there is, well…he built a suit with two electric whips to take on Iron Man. There should have been no Iron Man 2. Instead, there should have been an eight minute short where we see a montage of Whiplash building his suit, then Whiplash attacks Iron Man, Iron Man laughs and fires a missile into Whiplash’s unprotected, un-iron head and it explodes like in Scanners. The end.

The film’s most disappointing aspect isn’t even director Jon Favreau’s fault: It’s Scarlett Johansson’s. I don’t know if Van Wilder‘s semen has magical weight loss properties (…or do I?), but what the hell happened to this broad’s figure? She used to be awesome because she was the one chick with an ass the size of a dump truck that the average cracker-ass-cracker white guy would openly admit to wanting to bang. Not only that, but…look at those lungs! As I’m typing this, I’m trying to find out if there’s a state in this country that will allow me to marry a picture. Now she’s all bony and her rack is more atrophied and depressing than Detroit’s economy. I sure wish her tits and ass would grow back so I could remember what an interesting, intelligent person with a good heart she is.


So if you’re one of the three people left who hasn’t seen Iron Man 2 since it came out four years ago, give it a shot. You won’t be disappointed. Except by Scarlett Johansson’s decimated chest, which is a bigger national tragedy than that oil spill in the Gulf.

Tagged as: Iron Man 2, Jeff Bridges, Jon Favreau, Kristen Wiig, MacGruber, Robert Downey Jr., Scarlett Johansson, Val Kilmer.