So I literally just crawled back in from a 12:01 showing of Iron Man 2–they have those out here every so often–and now I can give you the straight early word.  You just read, a couple days ago, our boy Eoin’s take on things, and now you get mine.  And as far as I’m concerned, Iron Man 2 may not have been quite as good as its predecessor, but Iron Man movies are a lot like pizza–even when they’re bad, they’re still pretty good.

Iron Man 2 picks up where the last one left off: Tony Stark’s just outed himself as Iron Man, and the government’s not at all happy because Stark’s got exclusive control over a toy that tears holy hell out of anything the feds could throw at it.  Meanwhile, Pepper Mills just took over Stark Industries, Tony’s finding out first hand that heavy metal isn’t a good thing to have in your heart (especially when it’s palladium!) and there’s a whole lot of Tony’s past that’s about to come landing with a vengeance on his front door.

Oh yes. There will be explosions.  Lots of explosions.  And that’s both the high and low point of Iron  Man 2–things will blow up, Tony will make quips, Rhodey will be personally offended by Tony’s quips, Pepper will act vaguely exasperated the whole time (which is why Gwyneth Paltrow is perfect for this part–read her GOOP blog sometime and you’ll discover that she’s vaguely exasperated by like EVERYTHING that isn’t vegan or costs a fortune).  And that makes for a decent, entertaining movie.

But the problem here is that that’s EXACTLY what happened in the first movie.  Things blew up, Tony made quips, Rhodey was offended by them, Pepper was vaguely exasperated.  Did we do anything here besides tack on a few new characters?  No, not really.  But that’s okay.

People LIKED the first Iron Man, and since the SECOND Iron Man is so profoundly similar to the first, there’s absolutely nothing to suggest they won’t like the second one.

However, I would like to weigh in on one particular item–the growing prevalence of news figures as actors.  Iron Man 2 was packed with news figures, from Christiane Amanpour to Bill O’Reilly to G4 eye-candy Olivia Munn.  There’s something vaguely distasteful about news figures acting in movies, and though I can’t exactly pin it down, I just plain old don’ t like it.  Not that this stopped me from enjoying the movie–it just freaked me out.

Thus the Screenhead Ten Scale hands Iron Man 2, this frantic, wildly unoriginal action thriller, a seven out of ten for doing its job passably well, if for no other reason than it’s already so familiar with its job.