It’s easy to forget that, for the few months between the first Iron Man movie and The Dark Knight, a whole lot of us believed we had just seen perhaps the best superhero movie ever made. But, unfortunately for Iron Man, it had to be released in 2008, the same year that another superhero movie came away with an Oscar and some of the highest box office numbers of all time, leaving Tony Stark and Robert Downey Jr. deep beneath its shadow.

Iron Man 2 may not be quite good enough to crawl out of that shadow, but that doesn’t really matter — Jon Favreau’s second installment in the Iron Man franchise is a fun, funny and explosion-filled way to start the mind-numbing process of the summer movie season, like the seasoning on a slab of raw beef before it gets thrown into a meat grinder.

The sequel picks up right where the last one left off: on Tony Stark (Robert Downey Jr.) revealing himself as Iron Man, and on the foreboding tinkering of a super-smart Russian Mickey Rourke. As the government (or rather, Sam Rockwell and Gary Shandling) puts the pressure on him to give up the Iron Man suit, Stark starts to be sucked in by his flashy Iron Man persona, and the technology that keeps him alive, Stark discovers, may also be killing him. And then, I promise, s*** gets blown up.

Though the soundtrack is occasionally a music nerd’s dream — with two songs off of The Clash’s Combat Rock, a fight set to Daft Punk’s “Robot Rock” and a nice Beastie Boys deep cut, all the movie is missing is a guest verse from Ghostface Killah, aka Tony Starks, aka Ironman — the original score, on the other hand, usually feels schlocky and unimaginative. And while Scarlett Johansson certainly (ahem) looks the part, it is too clear that she’s way out of her acting league around war-torn veterans like Downey Jr., Rockwell and Don Cheadle. Then at other times she couldn’t even be heard under the high-pitched whining sound that is Gwyneth Paltrow in this movie.

But this is nitpicking. Like the extremists that this particular incarnation of Iron Man has already fought and beaten, Iron Man 2’s only real fundamental flaw mostly lays in its unwillingness to part from the archaisms of its source material. (That’s right: I’m calling Iron Man 2 a terrorist.) Having a secret agent with massive, heaving Scarlett Johansson cleavage, or an army of easy-to-kill robots who can get chopped in half without having to move up to an ‘R’ rating, means having the vestiges of a world that the Iron Man franchise should have already moved beyond. Not to say that Iron Man has ever been realistic (the science behind the character is still essentially “Bla bla bla protons bla bla bla nuclear reaction bla bla bla, you get it, I wear it in my chest”), but these silver-age comic book relics undercut exactly what these Iron Man movies can do that no other superhero movie can — Iron Man (or, as he’s come to be called in recent years, The Republican Superhero) can now be about the incredibly high stakes of our times, about weapons of mass destruction and addressing America’s post-9/11 fears, not about low-lit villains looking to stick it to Tony Stark just for being kind of a douchebag. They still have some of the former here, but whatever campiness found its way into the first Iron Man has only been amplified now, and that’s a shame. If and when Iron Man 3: Still Ironing comes out, its creators need to figure this out about their own franchise, or else we could have another dead-on-arrival X-Men: The Last Stand on our hands.

Let’s keep in mind, however, that Iron Man 2 was never trying to be a Dark Knight. Unlike The Dark Knight, where the movie is really in the character arcs and the shouting matches between the fights, and not in the Batmobile or the madvillainy, Iron Man 2 is always upfront that, in the end, its successes can be counted in explosions and piles of dead robots, not in political ideology or commentaries. And, thankfully, Iron Man 2 has enough style and solid, adaptable, interesting characters and performances — and its s*** done blow’d up good enough — to excuse the occasional pithy one-liner or textbook ominous strings-and-drums villain song. What we end up with in Iron Man 2 is a by-all-means success, but not really a rousing one.