Indeed, very thorough.  I had a real good time watching it the first time in the theater, but once you get past the initial "wow, that was fun" the questions do start mounting at an alarming rate.

There is one fundamental problem that really bothered me personally, and it has to do with anyone but Tony being able to put on an Iron-man suit.

(copy pasted from my Facebook)

The Iron-man suit is basically a high tech suit of armor. What is not generally understood, is that in medieval times a suit of armor was custom made to fit the wearer. If the pieces did not fit properly, the wearer could just as easily be hurt by his own armor as by his attacker. They were expensive, and took months, if not years to build. If you don't believe me, track down a member of the 501st who have had to build their own Stormtrooper armor.

Now, in the case of the Iron-man suit, you also have to take into account all the moving parts, and (here's the rub), the arc reactor to power the whole thing. Sure suits could be constructed that could be made with more liberal specifications, allowing more than one person to operate any given suit. That's essentially what happened with the Iron Monger suit, and what Justin Hammer was trying to build in the second movie. I'm fine with that.

I'm also fine with the notion that, given an arc reactor to study and reverse engineer, more of those could be built to power the new suits.

Here's my problem: the fact that Rhodes can put on Tony's mkII suit, and that it not only fits, but that he can power it at all.

Tony can use the Iron-man suits not only because he built them to fit himself, but because the arc reactor that powers them is implanted several inches in chest.

Even assuming that Rhodes and Tony are similar enough physically for Rhodes to fit into the mkII suit, he would have no place for the arc reactor to fit. There's a shot (in Ryan's review no less) of the military ogling all over the reactor, and it' a good four inches deep.

Bear in mind here that I'm also ignoring the fact that Tony would have most likely destroyed any other arc reactor other than the one he's actually using at the time, so where did the reactor powering Rhodes suit come from to begin with? Did Tony get all sentimental or something in between movies?

I can forgive a lot of things, but I get twitchy when stories ignore things like physics and limitations of space because they figure their audience is too stupid or lazy to care.

Nice analysis. Well balanced. It's basically everything I felt about the film: not terrible but kind of dull and convoluted with too much retreading and too many half-efforts at something new.

The only things I'll take minor issue with are:
- Vanko's revenge motive, which seems pretty reasonable to me. I like Vanko in general, actually. He had a sense of humor.
- Black Widow's action scene. Once she finally had something to do in the movie, it was pretty badass.

This is the reason I'm beginning to hate myself for ever becoming interested in visual effects, filmmaking, DiF and so on. Films I enjoy are butchered down to the point that even I start disliking them. And I used to enjoy watching the matrix sequels, dammit. Gah!

Great review. Completely agree. I remember sitting in the cinema and thinking at about the half way mark "where the hell is this going?" There are just too many subplots going on. The villain, Vanko, is absent for such long stretches that I genuinely forgot about him at one point amongst all the Stark-Potts-Rhodes stuff.