Twice the iron men, twice the Tony Stark narcissism, twice the villainous rage and even twice the smoking hot red-heads; this film couldn’t be more aptly named.   Jetting into 3000+ movie theatres to kick start the summer movie season, is Iron Man 2.  No doubt this film will open huge – audience polls nationwide rank it as one of the top 3 most anticipated films of Summer 2010 (anybody else miffed that “Tron: Legacy” was pushed to December?)  It has the effects, the action, and the running time (just over 2 hours), to give you exactly what is displayed on that cineplex ticket in your hand – Iron Man 2.

I was a comic book fan in the 80’s and 90’s, and although the Iron Man series  wasn’t on my weekly allowance busting trip to the comic store, I still knew of the character and that stoked my interest in seeing the first Iron Man movie.  The film was smart, witty, had an edge, and made me regret having never committed to reading the series in my youth.  Iron Man 2 doesn’t deliver the same payoff.  The film starts strong and ends with a blast but loses itself in between.  Tony Stark (Robert Downey Jr.: Chaplin, Weird Science) is just as witty as you’d expect him to be and Downey delivers yet again in the role, but his character gets twisted in the script.  Tony gets a heart (no, not a real one), and even experiences human frailty which you might say is the natural evolution of his character, but it plays on screen as an attempt to fill time and not a natural progression of the psyche of Tony Stark as we know him.

IM2 picks up where IM1 left off, Tony has just revealed he’s Iron Man and his press conference is being beamed about 6000 miles to Moscow where a physicist Ivan Vanko sits in his dark and tattered apartment watching and fuming.  Turns out he has a deep seeded hatred for the Stark family, having knowledge that Tony’s father, Howard, sold out his own father that helped develop that super cool ARC energy source that keeps Tony alive.   Ivan (Mickey Rourke: Angel Heart, The Wrestler), using the original ARC schematic, builds what can only be described as light saber whips wrapped in a an energy ribbon.  He sets his sights on the United States, and finding Tony to enact the revenge his recently penniless dead father deserves.   Ivan’s character is somewhat of a visual misnomer.  He appears within a dreary shanty-town in Moscow, yet his abode contains some pretty high-tech equipment and his wardrobe is straight out of this month’s Vanity Fair.  From his D&G signature glasses, to his retro new century hair (where do you go in the slum streets of Moscow to find a colorist that good?), Vanko seems more like a spin on the real life art and style of Mickey Rourke, and less like a character from the comic series.  With the help of an unscrupulous defense contractor Justin Hammer (Sam Rockwell: Galaxy Quest, The Green Mile), Ivan builds an army of Iron Men to help him dispatch of the Stark legacy once and for all.  Secretly placed within Stark Industries is the new red-head on the block Natalie Rushman (Scarlett Johansson: The Horse Whisperer, Vicky Cristina Barcelona).  Unfortunately her character, as both Stark employee and S.H.I.E.L.D. undercover agent, isn’t given enough film time.  Scarlett is an amazing talent and shines in every moment on screen; even her fight sequences leave you wanting to see more of her.  Her playful interactions with Tony evoke that same spark you saw in the original film when Tony and Pepper were close, only this time it looks steamier – more intense.

The supporting cast returns and in the case of Pepper Pots (Gwyneth Paltrow: Shakespeare In Love, Shallow Hal), are given more room to grow around Tony’s ever increasing ego.  Screenwriter Justin Theroux (Tropic Thunder) crosses that flirtatious line that you loved so much in the first film.  The chemistry between Tony & Pepper has always been undeniable, but it was kept at bay for the sake of Stark Industries business and to keep the audience wondering when, and if, they would eventually fall into the relationship you so desperately want to see them in.  This time around, you find out.  It’s important to note that even the filmmakers must have questioned this aspect of the story line.  If you’ve seen the early teasers and trailers for IM2, you might remember a bit where Iron Man is diving in to a celebration below.  Just before he leaps, he asks for a kiss, which Pepper is more than happy to lay on the facemask as she tosses it off the plane for Tony to catch.  That scene was pulled from the film just prior to release.  It’s replaced by Tony merely jumping and that was a good decision.  The love side of Tony and Pepper’s relationship is a line that should not be crossed, but inevitably happens in the third act of the film which is the payoff we all wanted, but still feels contrived when it’s delivered.  Tony’s personal driver Happy Hogan (Jon Favreau: Daredevil) is back too.  Not content to be a mere butler, this time Hogan becomes a fist swinging heavyweight.  Favreau should stick with being behind the camera, and away from being an actor.  His role seemed larger because he was the films’ Director, not because his character needed this level of growth. .

The film drags at various points especially as you watch Tony deal with his own mortality.  It wastes solid screen time as Tony prances about as a drunken buffoon in an Iron Man suit at his own birthday party and made worse when watching Justin Hammer whine about how inventive Tony is and how mediocre his company has become as a result.  If the CEO’s of Northrop Grumman and Lockheed Martin are anything like this character, the state of national defense in the United States is in really big trouble.  I can’t get over how this film has twice the iron and twice the action of the original but you leave feeling half as fulfilled as with IM1.  The flight sequences are amazingly imaginative and the digital effects are top notch, but it’s not enough to save the film.

If 2+ hours of high flying action aren’t enough for you, stick around until the credits end – you’ll get a nice sneak peek at the next Marvel comic book/movie franchise.

“Iron Man 2 (2010)” is rated PG-13 for sequences of intense action, sci fi action, violence and some language.

Rating: ★★★☆☆ 

Below we have embedded the ever fabulous interactive trailer put out by the fine folks over at Paramount for their upcoming sure fire hit, Iron Man 2.

According to Paramount there are hotspots within the embedded video and will release further content and information on the characters.

With the upcoming release of this film there has been an onslaught of pictures, TV spots and trailers all over the net. Stay tuned to Atomic Popcorn for updates on this upcoming blockbuster.

Iron Man 2 is easily one of the most-anticipated movies of this summer, and there has been a lot of hype around the movie. We’ve waded through dozens of redundant image sets to bring you 50 high-resolution images from the film.

Check them out below and click for full resolution:

Here are some posters for the movie:

Iron Man 2 stars Robert Downey Jr., Gwyneth Paltrow, Don Cheadle, Mickey Rourke, Scarlett Johansson, and Sam Rockwell and hits theaters May 7th.

Images courtesy of FilmOFilia, Collider, ComicBookMovie and CinemaBlend.

And now for a special bonus – a new 2-minute clip from the film:

More Robert Downey Jr.! More special effects! More robotic mayhem! And a 100% more Mickey Rourke and Scarlett Johannson than the first go-round!

Here it is, kids. The latest and longest Iron Man 2 trailer and it looks like a ton of fun. Well, that is if you were a fan of the first film’s light tone, comic riffing and over-heated action scenes. I was, and as a result I’m quite pleased with this, which looks set in the vein of the first, but with more of everything.

Things I like best about the new trailer: Rourke’s electric whips trailing out and away from him like lightning as he crosses the race track, Sam Rockwell’s industrialist, Sam Jackson as Nick Fury, and that shot of Downey and Cheadle in their respective armors looking up as trouble rains down.

Check out the brand new, ready-for-bear Iron Man 2 trailer below and leave your thoughts!

Is this the movie to beat summer 2010?

Antoine Fuqua is an interesting director. Most of his movies feature world-weary macho warriors who plow their way through a corrupt and dangerous system, often embracing that corruption themselves in an effort to cope.  These films—among them King Arthur, The Replacement Killers, and Training Day—are mostly slick action thrillers usually featuring stock characters and well-worn storylines. And yet, somehow, they gain their own individuality as a result of Fuqua’s focus on his actors and their performances.

Watching Denzel Washington rip his way through the flimsy script of Training Day and still conjure a plausible human being  or Stellan Skarsgard’s one-note Celtic villain mutter wearily ‘Finally, a man worth killing’ into the Welsh rain are some of the pleasures to be found in a Fuqua film. He takes an approach towards action filmmaking that one doesn’t see too often these days; he builds the special effects and shootouts around his actors and gives them room to define characters according to their natures.  It doesn’t always save the movie, but it does ensure that they don’t play like business as usual in the explosives factory. His newest film is no exception in this regard.

In Brooklyn’s Finest, a cop and criminal melodrama that likes to blur the lines between the just and the unjust, Fuqua has some great players to work with: Richard Gere, Ethan Hawke, Don Cheadle, Wesley Snipes, Lily Taylor and Ellen Barkin. Wisely, he understands that they are the best reason to see the movie and the strongest bits of Brooklyn are scenes where two or more of the characters come together and converse. Too bad then, that they occupy space with sequences of unrelenting violence and hard-boiled sleazy clichés about cops on the take and wizened drug dealers.

The script follows three different policemen struggling to remain separate from the dark underbelly of the city and over time their lives intersect in not so unusual ways.  The oldest (and drunkest) of these three is Eddie (Richard Gere) a veteran on the edge of retirement who drinks hard, solicits prostitutes and rounds out his bad movie cop behavior with the ever reliable ‘gun in the mouth but he can’t quite do it’ trick. Again, there are signs of care and consideration poured into Eddie and Gere captures such sincere moments of sadness and resignation that it’s a legitimate shock when we find them sharing time with scenes like the one where the old cop frankly instructs a prostitute on how best to please him.  

Also falling prey to the easy stereotypes of urban melodrama is the second, Sal (Ethan Hawke), a narcotics officer who kills drug dealers instead of apprehending them so he can confiscate the cash from their wallet after he mows them down. The screenplay’s sympathy excuse for this is two-fold. First off, Sal lives in a Dickensian shack of a house with his 7 kids and pregnant wife (Lily Taylor) and needs the money to buy a better home. Second, he’s constantly heading into church and confessing his sin, because he does mean well, y’know? Hawke isn’t aiming for subtlety or nuance with Sal. His scenes in the confessional hark back to his own brooding take on Hamlet. He is on a trajectory of destruction and we doubt the filmmakers have much in his future other than a bloody shootout.

The cop faring the best in Brooklyn’s Finest, despite being every bit as much a cliché as Eddie and Sal, is Don Cheadle’s Tango, an undercover agent in the drug precinct who has gotten too chummy with a dealer named Caz (Wesley Snipes) and has been in character so long he’s starting to have an crisis of identity and conscience. Tango is being offered promotions at work to ensnare Caz, but he can’t bring himself to take the man out because they are friends. Snipes is no more than a supporting player here, but his scenes with Cheadle are so good that you easily forget that the drama they are enacting was exhausted the moment it began.

All of Brooklyn’s Finest is really like that. After The Departed, filmmakers looking to evoke the deadly, seedy nature of big city deterioration and criminal escalation need look no further than shady police stations and under-handed drug ops on the fly.  The film is competently lensed by Patrick Murguia and the city has a sheen of urban desolation and metropolitan bustle that work at odds with one another. The action scenes are remorseless and brutal, but they are clearly captured and staged with a technical precision. So much of the film is working together that often in the midst of watching it, Finest feels like a good movie when it’s more a really well-dressed bad one.

How well you take to it will depend largely on your stomach for the archetypes and generalizations that exist within ‘bad cop’ movies. Although the language, the abundance of moral gray area, and the grim bloodshed is supposed to make the film more realistic, everything has been so perfectly calibrated that Brooklyn’s Finest feels as far away from the real world as Alice in Wonderland. To see this you would assume that poverty, not wealth, is the surest road to corruption and that every city cop who spends anytime confronting the seedier elements will be forced to eventually partner and sympathize with them.

As a passing action drama Brooklyn’s Finest does what it needs to do, but stop and consider what’s up there on screen and it all falls apart faster than Gere’s Eddie on a whiskey bender.

Rating: ★★½☆☆ 

Entertainment Tonight has posted one of their typically superficial, bare bones set visits, this time of Jon Favreau’s Iron Man 2, in which their reporters interview Robert Downey Jr., Gwyneth Paltrow, Don Cheadle and the Black Widow herself, Scarlett Johansson.

Most of the footage revolves around the race track sequence we’ve seen a dozen set pictures of already, in which Tony Stark first encounters Mickey Rourke’s Whiplash.

Also investigated is Downey’s workout routine, just in case you want to have a rock-solid Tony Stark set of abs by the time this movie is released on May 7th, 2010.

Check out the footage below, and let us know what you think in the comments!

These days, when it comes to political thrillers, audiences seem to be a little wary, mainly because they don’t want to sit through a lecture about our nation’s political system.  That’s probably why a film like last year’s “Rendition”, which I consider to be one of 2007′s best films, didn’t fare too well at the box office.  The new thriller “Traitor”, an overall effective film, may fall victim to the same problem seeing as it deals directly with issues that the average movie going audience most likely won’t want to hear about.  However, I’d still say go see it because even though it may be a relatively predictable film, there’s no denying that it was made with solid skill.

The traitor that the title refers to is Samir Horn (Don Cheadle), a black man with a partial Sudanese background who decided to become an undercover Special Op for the United States after, as a young boy, he watched his father die in a car bombing.  One of Samir’s best abilities as a U.S. operative is how he can infiltrate a terrorist network and convince them that he’s on their side.  When we first meet Samir, he’s selling a group of terrorists some weapons, but all of a sudden, the FBI bursts in, arrests everyone and sends them all to a terrorist prison.  After a brief stint in jail and a daring escape, Samir enters another terrorist cell that’s planning an elaborate scheme which involves thirty different suicide bombers.  However, conflict arises when the FBI begins to hunt down Samir, because he’s the only suspect they know of, and at the same time we learn that Samir may be a plant by the CIA, who are using him to take down that same terrorist cell.

The main reason to see “Traitor” is Don Cheadle.  He’s such a good actor, and he’s able to excel above some pretty standard material.  The character of Samir horn is someone who’s pretty open about religion and he’s also internally conflicted about his position.  The screenplay does a good job of exploring the moral questions that operating on both sides can entail, especially considering it’s set during the present time, but it’s Cheadle who effectively shows the weariness and scattered bursts of frustration that a man in his position would experience.  Plus, Cheadle never turns Samir into a full-on action hero, just like how the filmmakers never turn “Traitor” into a full-on action film.  It does have the same realistic tone and style of the “Bourne” movies, but it’s more action-oriented sections are more spaced out, but that’s not particularly a bad thing.  I like the fact that “Traitor” is more about how the system works when it comes to terrorism, rather than just the acts of terrorism by themselves.

In addition to Don Cheadle, there are some other good actors on display here.  Guy Pierce, who was in one of my favorite films of all-time, “Memento”, plays Roy Clayton, the FBI agent spearheading the team pursuing Samir.  Yes, the role of the straight-arrow FBI agent is one that’s pretty much been done to death, but given how good of an actor Pierce is, he keeps his character interesting enough all the way through, and the same goes for his partner played by Neal McDonough.  Jeff Daniels is also in the film, playing the top CIA brass who is the only person who knows about Samir’s inside operation, and unfortunately, Daniels is criminally underused.  But he’s still good with what little screen time he does have.

Now, I understand filmmakers putting the war on terror in the spotlight when it comes to stories such as these, but in my opinion, it’s starting to wear a little thin.  The issue worked as the main idea of a film such as “Rendition”, but even though I loved that film, I still thought that showing the issue full-on got a little tiresome after a while.  The majority of “Traitor” takes place in the foreign “conflict countries”, I guess you could call them, but I have to say that I could do without some of these movies for a while.  How about taking a break from these foreign political thrillers and making some that stay in the U.S., huh, Hollywood?

But in the end, “Traitor” is nonetheless a well-made film with some solid performances and good suspense.  It ain’t no “Jason Bourne”, but I’d still recommend it.

Rating: ☆☆☆☆☆