Iron Man 3 Review

Hey, I can actually see the other armors!

In some cases, better late than never does not apply.

I’ll start with the good stuff. Robert Downey Jr. was great as always, and I really liked Gwyneth Paltrow’s Pepper Potts getting a little bit of time in the suit. We didn’t get Rescue, but at least Potts got to be heroic. I actually liked a lot of the banter in Shane Black’s version of a super-hero film. The small asides, the depth of character given to throwaway thugs, I appreciated those small touches.

But that brings me to my first complaint. The level of bad guy didn’t increase enough! We had tons of small-time gun-toting crooks hanging around in Miami, with no backup from their hot compadres. Why not put a couple melting dudes in the compound too, doesn’t that make sense? Why leave them all at the oil rig?

And why, oh why, with the width and depth of the Marvel Universe available to you, would you have an army of guys WITH THE SAME UNDEFINABLE POWERS? Can they all breathe fire, or was Killian special? Why in the world would they give Pepper Potts the Extremis upgrade but not give it to Maya Hansen; she freaking invented it! How did they actually kill Killian? Didn’t they just blow him up repeatedly? He kept coming back until his lines in the script ran out, I guess.

Pepper's armor as it should be

Why have Killian form Advanced Idea Mechanics (AIM) if not one yellow beekeeper suit is even hinted at? Why use it at all? Roxxon got thrown in here too, but just as fan service.

And the Extremis powers. What the heck do they even do? Regeneration, obviously, but why are people blowing up? Was that on purpose? It seemed like the explosions were caused by people not handling their Extremis upgrades correctly, so how could the “Mandarin” be predicting certain numbers of attacks? Why did Rhodey mention that there were more attacks than what the public knew about? Is the “Mandarin” only announcing some of them on TV?

The Iron Patriot. UGH. The armor looked great, and the banter about the War Machine vs. Iron Patriot branding was consistently amusing. But the Iron Patriot never got to do anything. Don Cheadle spent the film flying to the wrong place or retreating. Why even put him in the movie? When you’ve got a character with an auto-cannon on his shoulders, I want to see it shoot! I want to see Don Cheadle rip into some bad guys as a SUPER HERO! Not as a generic action movie hero. This complaint applies to RDJr too, but he at least spends some time in the Mark 42 armor. (Too bad he doesn’t carry a cell phone, though.)

Iron Man, is that you?

The armor. Why bother to create an army of toyetic Iron Man armors with great names if you aren’t even going to show them? I’d say there were only three sets of armor that got screen time where you could clearly see the suit. I saw the Mark 42 silly flying armor, the Avengers armor, and the Igor suit that held up the collapsing building at the oil rig. Don’t put all those suits in, tease us with how cool they could be, then BLOW THEM UP.

In a world that clearly, clearly needs Iron Man, I think it is a bit selfish of Tony Stark to blow up all his suits. Hell, you know Happy Hogan would wear one (he was another bright spot in this film). Pepper Potts shouldn’t have been riding him either. That fireworks display made both characters seem petulant and self-indulgent.

Now that is the Mandarin!

Now it is time for the biggie. The moment where the movie crashed from a B down to my final grade of a D (it did continue to get worse, though). The Mandarin. How the heck do you take a historied, awesome character with a fantastic look and power set, and turn him into a silly actor? Listen, I understand Mandarin has some confusing history and origins, but clearly Black could have chosen one or made up his own. Now I’m heartbroken that he actually wore his rings in the commercial, because it means that really was Marvel’s attempt to bring the character to the screen. Ben Kingsley could have had a great take on him, but instead we get a mockery of the classic villain. The Batman Begins Ra’s Al Ghul trick is one thing, this is just insulting.

So yeah, this is the first time since Thomas Jane’s Punisher that I was considering walking out of the theater. I actually thought my time would be better going to sleep. I shouldn’t have stayed for the bonus scene, either. I want to be excited about the next movie, not just given a throwaway scene.

Iron Man 3 is proof that Comics are EVIL.