Director Jon Favreau’s $200 million sequel in the Iron Man series packed theaters and crushed the weekend competition but lacks the ingenuity, storyline and impact of the first installment in 2008.

Get your calculator. Now add $1.9 million (Nightmare on Elm Street) to $6.7 million (How To Train Your Dragon) to $5.3 million (Date Night) to $4.3 million (The Back Up Plan). Now multiply that number times 5 and you still haven’t made the $133 million dollars that Iron Man II pulled in this weekend to rank as the fifth highest weekend-opener of all time.

Scores of faithful fans jammed the theatres this weekend, leaving the beaches conspicuously empty despite the beautiful spring weather. After all of the Hollywood hype surrounding Iron Man II caused legions of fans to fill theaters to capacity this weekend, however, the general consensus in theatres (at least in my row) seems to be that Iron Man II is something of a letdown.

Everyone knows about the curse of the sequel. Look at Matrix Reloaded and Pirates of the Caribbean: At Worlds End. Two movies that did incredibly well at the box-office, inspired a loyal fan base, and were then followed up with vomitous offerings for seconds. Sometimes the sequels are so bad that the original stars won’t even appear in them, and have to be replaced with lesser “B” movie actors or actors whose careers are experiencing a gentle downward spiral.

It’s not surprising that movie audiences expected great things from the sequel considering the success Iron Man I enjoyed in 2008. After grossing almost $600 million worldwide and holding a place in the top 100 grossing films of all time, you’d expect the sequel to do as well as it did. After all it’s got all the hype of the first going for it, and a built-in fan-base.

You’d also expect it to be a great movie, and that, unfortunately, is where you’d be disappointed. Audiences are reacting weakly and that does not bode well for next weekend’s returns. The usual culprits in this scenario are not immediately evident in the case of IM2.

Usually the studio, in this case Paramount, sees an opportunity to cut costs on a sequel and rely on the fan base from the original to deliver at least two-thirds of the ticket sales, while spending only half the amount on marketing. In this case Paramount increased the $140 million budget from the first to $200 million for the sequel, and Stan Lee of Marvel Comics apparently gave more latitude to actor/director Jon Favreau with regards to the script. (Favreau is notorious for improvising dialogue.)

There was plenty of exposition in the storyline which made the story drag somewhat. Many scenes felt improvised and therefore lacked the sharpness of the dialogue in the first script that made the Tony Stark (Robert Downey Jr.) character so charming. There was also a lack of continuity, if not chemistry, in the relationship between Stark and his best friend Lt. Colonel “Rhodey” Rhodes caused by the fact that Don Cheadle replaced Terrence Howard in the role. Downey looked so haggard that one wondered if the subplot of Stark being ill wasn’t written in to cover it. Either way, Downey was looking a bit worse for the wear and tear. All of the effects are CGI we saw in the first film and the chemistry between Stark and his repressed secretary Pepper Potts (Gwyneth Paltrow) isn’t anything to write home about. At the end there’s a particularly sexless kiss between the two that felt more like siblings making out than two people finally blowing the lid off of years of suppressed desire. Her character even asks Stark after the kiss, “Weird?” No fewer than three people within earshot answered the screen softly; “Yes.”

There are a couple of people to love in IM2, though they’re the villains. IM2 is worth seeing if for no other reason than the performances of Sam Rockwell as Justin Hammer, and Mickey Rourke as Ivan Vanko.

Sequels will always disappoint, because of the simple fact that it’s more of the same. With IM2, there’s another disappointment though. In the first film, we fell in love a womanizing, billionaire man-about-town. Stark was a charming genius that created something incredible, but was also incredibly flawed. We loved him because he was flawed and faulted and at the same time we rooted for him to come out on top.

In the second film we expect Stark to honor the old saying “with great power comes great responsibility.” And he doesn’t. Iron Man is now responsible for the security of the United States and he doesn’t even come off as someone you’d let babysit for the afternoon. That makes all of his antics seem reckless, irresponsible and not nearly as likeable as he was when we first met him.