I... was not impressed. Which is not to say I disliked it, either. It's a worse film than the much more tightly focused first entry and I'm a bit undecided about whether it's a bit worse than Iron Man 2 as well.
The thing is, that PTSD subplot Bob talks about in his weirdly long recap of most of the plot? It gets abandoned with no resolution. The legitimately funny out-of-suit half an hour in the middle? It would have been daring for anybody else, but Black goes back to stuff he turned into action movie tropes in the first place and feels a bit too comfortable with them. The actually funny and surprising twist? It adds to an already convoluted plot with multiple dangling threads and a few too many big twists.
It's a messy movie, really. If you thought the excursion to Avengers prequel mode in Iron Man 2 was too loose this has the same thing, only here the friction is between the overblown whodunit plot, the superhero movie action and the character action comedy stuff. The action comedy bits are the best, because of course they are, look at the cast and crew. The superhero action is more Avengers than the smaller earlier Marvel films and the character bits get forgotten or resolved in cheap ways. All together feels too busy and too hazy for its own good.
But hey, no harm in seeing it, either. It's funny and... well, harmless. It's entertaining. But if you're thinking about skipping it? Yeah, that's safe to do as well. There are no overt plot tie-ins to the Avengers stuff (somebody took the Iron Man 2 criticism to heart) and the actual Avengers film is as good a wrap-up for the character as this is.
By the way, I feel like superhero movie reviews have given me a better barometer for Bob as a critic than anything else he does. Clearly he's very forgiving with loose structure and messy storytelling (Captain "just go into montage mode for the second half" America and this prove as much) and telling a focused, single story comes second to individual beats in terms of making him react positively, especially if the beats are fan-pleasing and the story has some contextual rough spots (Amazing Spider-Man, Star Trek '09). This is not an indictment or a defense of Bob as a critic, but it's certainly helpful when I'm trying to figure out when his opinion is going to be a good indicator of my own enjoyment of a film.
