iron man 2

There seems to be a great tendency in comic book film to produce over-complicated sequels.

The first film in a comic-book franchise always has to cover the origin story. If the hero has powers, it generally has to show how he got them, or otherwise show how he got to his default 'hero' position. This isn't universally true - in X-Men most of the heroes already have their powers, but even their you get some origins or at least explanation of what mutants are.

But essentially, origin stories are covered by part 1. Because this will take up a good chunk of the story, there will only be enough space for one villain.

Now when it comes time for the sequel, we've already had the origin story, so there's now a big chunk of time free for an extra villain or two - right? Well yes, but the problem is it's actually really complicated to do multiple villains, not least of all because villains also need origin stories.

What I'm driving at is that there's a tendency to overfill sequels with villains, rather than come up with a proper, emotionally involving story for the hero. So, a good sequel, like Spiderman 2, only has one villain - Doc Ok - but has an emotionally engaging story for the hero to replace the origin story. A bad sequel, like Spiderman 3, crams itself so full of villains that the hero's story dwindles to nothing and all those villains get short-shrift too.

Iron Man 2 somehow manages to not have too many villains, but at the same time still somehow manages to have too much stuff into it that it doesn't really work. The problem here, though, seems to be forcing too much into the hero's own story.

So you've got him being killed by his chest energy thing, giving up control of his company, running some sort of weird expo thing, exploring his relationship with his dad, being recruited (ish) by Nick Fury to the Avengers, developing his relationship with Pepper and even being responsible for world peace (!) ... and the list goes on. They've crammed the film so full of stuff for Tony, that all of it seems to get short shrift.

And the villain ends up feeling like an add-on simply because they needed an excuse for some special effects. This is especially annoying when you consider that the idea of the villain is closely linked to his dad. It could have been so much more involving.

But what adds insult to injury is that the most interesting thing about Tony Stark - his drinking problem - isn't really even there. Well, it's sort of there, but it's not clear. I think the problem was that they wanted to hint at it, but because it had to be a U/Pg film, they couldn't really include it properly.

So yeah, to be frank, it ends up being a big old mess, even to the extent that the sharp wit that runs through the first film is a bit lacking in this second film.

Shame really, because it looks great and the acting's great - the plot just doesn't quite work.