I loved the first Iron Man for the self-irony of Robert Downey Jr. He portrayed so well this self-absorbed narcissist with a somehow still pure heart, who finally learns to put his charms and material resources to good use. I loved the relationship between Pepper and him. Despite his success and fame, he is essentially alone, his only friend and not-so-secret love being Pepper. And I liked the fact that given the basic assumptions of the plot, most of it actually made sense.

The second part fails in most aspects in my opinion. Suddenly Pepper is just another bickering b****, and he treats her just like that. All the sweet relationship and vulnerability that was visible in IM1 is gone. The plot is rather confused and very, very cliché. I couldn't believe they are really going through with the silly "Bad Russian" stereotype in 2010. This came 30-40 years too late. Yeah there are lots of machines flying around doing fancy stuff, so what. Seen that so often, a bit Transformers, a bit Spiderman, a bit Fantastic Fours. But nothing really that holds it all together, the saddest part being the characters turning from charming, funny humans to dumb, predictable Hollywood idiots.

Johansson is beautiful, but her role is odd. She pulls off cool fight scenes though. Cheadle or his role, I'm not sure, were boring. Rourke did well except for the stupid role he got. Paltrow the same, could have been good except they gave her no lines but bickering.

All in all way below part 1 and still below my humble expectations. 4 points for Johanssons fight scenes.