Iron Man 2 reviews are out: bad reviews have wrong take

Iron Man 2 is supposed to be released May 7th, but Jon Favreau is so confident in his second take on the story of a weapons genius and his famous exoskeleton that he let some so-called critics see it.

Thus, Iron Man 2 reviews are out, but while the reviews pan the movie, they are awful themselves. This blogger's never seen a set of reviews that seem so bent on finding something wrong they wind up becoming studies in nitpicking. As exhibit one, let's take The Hollywood Reporter (THR).

Kirk Honeycutt of THR does a lot of explaining that Iron Man 2 isn't logical without explaining why. We just have to understand his logic. But considering the Arizona Governor's decision to approve a horribly psychotic immigration law in that state, we have to be careful to trust anyone's logic now, even that of a movie critic.

What Kirk Honeycutt seems to miss is that Iron Man is grounded in a high level of realism. That Tony Stark is dying from his own creation has to cause some kind of emotional response from him. Trouble is Kirk Honeycutt doesn't tell us what that is. That's not right, because fans of Iron Man know the story, so it's a good idea for the reviewer to tell us what the movie is doing so we can at least know how it works. I can't tell that from Kirk Honeycutt's review.

Then there's Den of Geek, a cool-ass name for a website. But Simon Brew's review confused me. I can't determine if Simon Brew's telling me Iron Man 2 is better than the first, or the opposite.

But I'll give Den of Geek credit because, well, they're geeks. From that, Iron Man 2 seems just OK, but not at the level of The Dark Knight.

Frankly, I wasn't expecting that anyway.

Roch the Casbah