This movie took years to appreciate

I think this is the best Iron Man movie for repeated viewings. The first one gets the most praise, and it's good, but you have to go through all the origin stuff, and I'm not always in the mood. This one jumps right in.

Anyway, I really like this movie and think it's severely underrated. You get several different armors, War Machine, Black Widow, Nick Fury, Pepper, drunk Tony. What's not to like? Whiplash maybe isn't the best villain, but he gets better with subsequent viewings.

Yeah I really like this movie, think it is a bit underrated, a 7.1 is a bit low, was thinking it might actually be better than the first one, but the ending kind of ruined it a bit, so because of that the first one is better.

I always liked this one from the start, and could never really understand why so many people thought it to be bad or just "meh" I think it's nearly as good as the first one, much better than IM3, and yes, I like all the little stepping stones it introduces for the Avengers, and the most rewatchable aspect: Justin Hammer, I just really like Sam Rockwell and hope he gets to come back to the MCU in some way

Yes, this movie plays much better viewed in hindsight of the fully established MCU. A fair portion of this movie is Avengers building stuff that really has no place being in a sequel. Iron Man 2 is as much an episodic installment as it is a movie. This was very frustrating back when it came out, but now I think it's one of the film strengths.

"I said no camels, that's five camels, can't you count?"

The biggest (and dumbest) complaint about the film is the whole "its just an Avengers set-up" comment.

This is far from the truth. There is maybe, and I mean maybe 5 minutes of screentime that could be considered Avengers set-up. And even with that set-up, those scenes still have relevance to the plot. Not only is this complaint stupid, it's essentially made up out of thin air.
What's funny is that people bitch about the Phase 2 movies not having enough Avengers connections...

The film isn't flawless. It lacks the tight scripting of the first and third film and it fumbles it's villain, but as a continuation of Tony's journey, it's great.

your first impression was the right one, it's just when you see how terrible the avengers is, you start to think that iron man 3 wasn't that bad, and when you see how bad iron man 3 was you start to think, well meh is much better than bad, and when you realize how meh it was, you think well at least the first iron man wasn't meh, though wasn't good

I think the reason this movie has aged so well is because at this point we've seen so much of Iron Man in action that we're far more forgiving of an earlier film that's more of a character piece on Tony Stark. Was initially disappointed with Iron Man 2 frankly because the movie was very high on talking and very low on action. Felt it was poorly paced and I didn't expect it to be a comedy rather instead to expand on the adventure of the first film. I also wasn't sure how to read Justin Hammer's character in deciding whether he was just a goofy executive with smarts or if he actually was more than he pretended to be. Really I was just waiting for something interesting and exciting to happen and it never really delivered. Now that we have Avengers & co. it's easier to forgive Iron Man 2 and appreciate it more for what it is knowing we have plenty of other films to see Iron Man at his prime.

This one is my favorite of the IRON MAN solo movies. I never really got the hate toward it. Or THOR: THE DARK WORLD for that matter.


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