MTV's Kurt Loder reviews "Iron Man 2"

[underpants]

Mickey Rourke and Robert Downey Jr. are fascinating actors in such radically different ways that you wonder what it would be like if they made a movie together. You'll still be wondering after watching "Iron Man 2," in which both men appear, but rarely interact. Downey is back as Tony Stark, the billionaire industrialist and lovable egomaniac who revealed himself to the world as Iron Man at the end of the first film. Rourke lumbers into the tale as Ivan Vanko, a muttering renegade physicist with a mouthful of metal and a slab-like body festooned with crude tattoos. The tattoos have only slightly more import for the story than the character's pet parrot, which has none; but Rourke, with his brooding charisma, brings an effortless heavy menace to each of his scenes.

It's unfortunate that he doesn't have much in the way of dialogue (and a lot of what he does get to say, through a glutinous Russian accent, is unintelligible); but then he doesn't have much in the way of room, either. The movie is overstuffed with characters. Some are returning from the previous film: Pepper Potts (Gwyneth Paltrow), Stark's personal assistant and love interest; "Rhodey" Rhodes (Don Cheadle, replacing the apparently overpriced Terrence Howard), Stark's pilot pal; Happy Hogan (director Jon Favreau), his driver; and espionage honcho Nick Fury (Samuel L. Jackson), who was briefly seen at the end of the first picture recruiting for a nascent superhero undertaking called the Avenger Initiative. ("I'm not ready to join your little boy band," Stark tells him here.)

New to the fray are Justin Hammer (Sam Rockwell), a scheming armaments manufacturer, and Natalie Rushman (Scarlett Johansson), Stark's new legal-affairs hotshot, who is not in any way what she seems. Also salted in are Garry Shandling, as a devious senator, and a number of familiar real-world faces, among them Bill O'Reilly, Christiane Amanpour and, inevitably, Marvel man Stan Lee. Not to mention a whole army — and navy, and marine corps — of heavily weaponized robot warriors. The movie is one long crowd scene.

After that, though, the endless smackdowns, super-chases and general incendiary pandemonium start to grind us down — it feels like we're watching "Transformers 3" — and we soon realize that fight scenes involving faceless actors in big titanium battle suits sound like nothing so much as a multi-kettle kitchen accident.

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