Iron Man 2 isn’t your daddy’s superhero movie. It’s your granddaddy’s. The steady torrent of wisecracks on the screen is indebted to the ’30s screwball comedies that accelerated newly audible dialogue to supersonic speed; and in this high-grade hybrid the screws are actual screws, and the balls energy-based projectiles launched from our hero’s metallic palm. The quips fly faster than the energy balls. (If our hero has any trouble saving the world, it’s only because he’s out of breath.) This two-hour movie doesn’t linger long—which is a virtue. But it poops out early. The filmmakers are so preoccupied with sequels, spin-offs, and tie-ins that the story neither concludes nor hangs from a cliff but splits like a horny amoeba. Their verbosity is by way of apologizing for the sale. I had a good time, but my ears tolled from all the ringing up.

It’s difficult to describe the plot without mistaking it with premonitions of The Avengers or Iron Man 5, but, this time around, the hotrod homunculus has to contend with two new villains—neither of whom are very super. Iron Man’s not very altered ego—Tony Stark (Robert Downey, Jr.)—faces off with daddy issues while stressing the bejeezus out of his sort-of significant other (Gwyneth Paltrow). Mickey Rourke’s Vanko has daddy issues, too, and avenges his father by way of a string of supercharged Hanukkah lights that he lashes Stark—and several other Formula One drivers—with. This display impresses a skeevy Stark Corp. competitor (Sam Rockwell) who pines for a military contract that Stark refuses to make; the unveiling of Stark’s high-tech suit of armor has ushered in an era of world peace, but Rockwell’s Hammer and Senator Garry Shandling (!) know that peace doesn’t pay the bills. (His name is Hammer, and he really is a tool; since the U.S. ain’t buying, and Iron Man’s off the market, he pawns off his gimcrackery to the Axis of Evil, which, unfortunately, is not the name of a comic-book cadre.)

Conniving cinematic moguls have all the money in the world and never know what they’re paying for. The misalliance between the Wall Street grub and the Soviet Bloc-head threatens Stark’s international armistice and—yada yada yada. This expression of impatience is as much mine as the filmmakers’: Jon Favreau, the franchise’s auteur apparent, and Justin Theroux, the solo screenwriter. (The 2008 prequel enumerated four.) If Iron Man wasn’t played for breezy irony, it would most likely have been because these filmmakers had lost their minds—like most of the recent superhero movies have. A sense of proportion is key. When it makes one feel indignation at a project that one’s working on, that sense can have a poisonous effect on the tone. But this crew isn’t snide or condescending; their tone is consistently sportive. Many of the players are reprising their roles from the first film, and nearly everyone seems to be in it for kicks. Downey acts in the manner of a well-born Bill Murray; his hauteur burbles like molasses. He, Paltrow, and Scarlett Johannson—playing Double Agent Romanoff (the laziest Slavic surname a writer could contrive)—practically race each other to see who can spew smart-talk fastest. (Johannson has a hypnotic hold on innuendo even after it’s left her lips.) Only Don Cheadle—who’s demonstrated more talent in better roles, and replaces Terrence Howard as Lt. Colonel Rhodes—delivers his lines in a way that seems a little too robotic. (Downey looks robotic. He’s absurdly hale for 45, but his playboy’s looks are as integral to the fantasy as the special effects. These stars shine brighter than the glossiest gossip rag.)

Of the newcomers, Rockwell’s festooned in three-piece suits that make him look like a wallflower at a ’70s disco; he’s downgraded from walk to waddle to match his chichi threads. I think it’s an homage to The Wrestler when Stark conks Vanko on the noggin with a folding chair; but I hope Rourke pays homage to that performance by not coasting through the rest of his roles. He Russifies well, but he and Eric Bana (the Star Trek nemesis) ought to form a support group for neglected adversaries. Vanko is a symptom writer’s block rather than a roadblock to our heroes; and when he blows Queens to smithereens, it hardly gums up traffic any more than the daily commute.

The filmmakers’ construction isn’t nearly as durable as Stark’s suit of armor, but it’s an affable time-killer for sticky summer days; it may not challenge one’s intelligence, but it doesn’t insult it, either. Star Trek resurrected its heroes merely to piss on their graves; James Bond—who, in his spry, pre-Daniel Craig form was Tony Stark’s swanky ancestor—has gotten sententious. And the possibilities for something new—and interesting—from superhero movies have long since winnowed away. (Spiritually, the vigilantes in Watchmen were pallbearers at the genre’s funeral, but they only ended up burying a Watchmen franchise.) In the early 2000s, the X-men stood for acceptance, the right to be oneself, to grow up and become what one will; and the childlike Spider-Man features used waking up muscle-bound, the returned affections of a boyhood crush, and a newfound capacity for spraying white goo as a metaphor for adolescence—even if my metaphor might inspire Sam Raimi to scrub my palate with soap till I foam at the mouth. The heroes themselves may have grown up, but they still live in a kid’s fantasy domain; Stark the Renaissance man is serial wish fulfillment, page after page. So when The Dark Knight came out two months after the first Iron Man, and was celebrated as “mature” and “grown-up,” my mouth really did start to foam; the seriousness of its aspirations were what made the film pitifully naïve.

That superhero movies have flown so high as a Hollywood staple almost certainly relates to the way the nation reacted to Sept. 11, and the way the Bush administration conducted the War on Terror. The Dark Knight, likely unconsciously, made the implicit linkage explicit. Our collective, vestigial need for an authority figure—a superhuman big daddy—to wage our wars for us, expiate our crimes, stand by in selfless invigilation over his flock, and vanquish the subhuman abstractions of evil that “threaten our way of life” was a raw nerve that The Dark Knight groped. It was a safety blanket stitched with moral absolutes; and yet its “realism” legitimized our thoughtless acceptance of fascism by projecting it on the real world. For all its equivocations, it dumbed discourse down. Not that Iron Man 2 poses legitimate solutions to foreign-policy conundrums; the Obama administration isn’t going to consult Favreau anytime soon. “Ah yes!” quoth Robert Gates. “Of course we should disarm the military, and have a loaded (in all senses), impossibly handsome, improbably smart, corporate-heir vigilante shoulder the global balance of power! I mean, he gets hammered—and hammers Hammer—but he’s the world’s sexiest, super-est genius, and he’s on our side. Plus, he’s a TMZ darling!” But, to be fair, even Stark knows this benevolent despotism isn’t on solid footing. And so do the filmmakers, who, without insulting the fans, verbally zip past it. Their airy (airless?) banter lets even children know how far Iron Man lives from our world.

I’ve given Iron Man 2 more words than it requires; the scriptwriter has already chocked it full enough, leaving nothing left to pun-itrate. But the distinction between Favreau and Theroux’s campy camp and the “Why so serious?” (really, why?) legation is worth making. This is nothing more than a dopey, enjoyable spectacle, but its hedonistic wit and unpretentious sense of fun make iron feel lighter than air. My concern is that the franchise’s freshness will quickly turn to rot, and that Iron Man’s many progeny—already slated for production—will be stillborn before they reach theaters. Not that the studios heed my concerns: My appetite for superheroics is so whet that it’s soaked up. But legions of dedicated fanboys remain as slakeless as supervillains.