Every MCU Movie - Ranked From Worst To Best

14. Iron Man 2

It's incredible to think that a film as good as Iron Man could have inspired a sequel as half-cooked and hard to watch as Iron Man 2, from the same director. But despite more good ideas, Iron Man 2 feels like Jon Favreau was only half-invested and didn't really know how to advance the scale of the movie. If you watch Chef now, his allegory of making good, simple food rather than over-blown, ridiculous spectacle food feels like a two finger salute to this film more than any other.

Strengths

The idea of Tony descending into personal despair and self-destruction always fit with the comic book portrayal of Stark as a slightly broken toy, and it also fit Robert Downey Jr as an actor. He's again exceptional as Stark, snarky, slightly haunted and on a fast-track to ruin thanks to his arrogance, and he's mostly the only redeemable aspect of the film.

Sam Rockwell's attempt at a copycat is also a fundamentally great idea, but he just sort of gets pushed out as the film descends into a cacophony of metal hitting metal.

And the soundtrack - by ACDC, of course - is absolutely brilliant.

Weaknesses

The fights are entirely threatless, despite the attempt to make them grander in scale, two villains are under-used and have their endings messed up and there's too little of the cocky enthusiasm that made the first film so great. Plus the chemistry between Stark and Rhodey - such a good part of Iron Man 3 - is utterly unconvincing.