Movie Review: "Iron Man 3"

Twist and Shout.

The third installment in the Iron Man standalone movies, Iron Man 3 delivers plenty of what we've come to expect and love from the irreplaceable Robert Downey Jr.'s Tony Stark - throwaway quips, irrepressible sass, and bucketloads of personal charisma.  That's good, because the storyline has some problems, and logic is not its friend, especially in the third act.  Better than 2010's Iron Man 2, but not as good as the original 2008 Iron Man (admittedly, how could it be?), on the strength of its leading man Iron Man 3 still kicks off the much-awaited summer blockbuster popcorn movie season with plenty of color and action.

The Spoiler-Free Review:

In the aftermath of what happened in The Avengers, Stark's both suffering from a kind of PTSD and attempting to make sense of his priorities.  In the midst of this, as he tinkers with his tech and tries to build his relationship with Pepper Potts (Gwyneth Paltrow), a pair of villains emerge: Aldrich Killian (Guy Pearce), a scientist weaponizing genetic research, and the Mandarin (Sir Ben Kingsley), Iron Man's greatest nemesis from the comic books.

Oh, and as usual for a Marvel movie, you should both keep an eye out for Stan Lee's cameo and stay after the credits roll.  Keep your eyes peeled too for a giggleworthy reference to a certain very popular British TV show and the reappearance of a character from the first Iron Man to pick up a throwaway reference in that flick.

Iron Man 3 runs 130 minutes and is rated PG-13 for violence, sci fi/fantasy/comic book action sequences, and mild language.

MM gives Iron Man 3 a grade of B for a number of reasons that she can't discuss without spoiling the movie.  OK, it's really a B just for Tony Stark.

Rotten Tomatoes gives the flick the Fresh rating of 78%.

YOU'VE BEEN WARNED: SPOILERS FOLLOW IN A MORE DETAILED REVIEW BELOW.

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All right, let's talk, shall we?  I love Tony Stark.  Absolutely looooooooove Tony Stark.  I could watch Tony all day long.  Robert Downey Jr.'s Stark is one of the best things to happen to sci fi/fantasy/comic book movies in a long, long time.  But where the movie itself is concerned and we talk about plot, the more I think about it, the less I like it.  I'm at the point where I think I should just stop thinking about it altogether.  Maybe I'm overanalyzing, but there are the problems that I see:

Just what is Killian's motivation, really?  Why is he busy trying to wreck the country?  Isn't his beef with Tony personally?  Did he honestly concoct this because Tony was a jerk to him once at some tech conference?  Or was it partly because Happy Hogan got caught in an explosion by chance?  Why is Guy Pearce apparently constantly an overdone villain? (cf. Lawless, The Count of Monte Cristo)

Maya Hansen (Rebecca Hall): Completely muddled characterization that ultimately didn't even matter.  Whatever.

The plot twist and the ultimate waste of the Mandarin (see Cinema Blend's rant).  At first the twist was a surprise, and I like surprises.  Kingsley as Trevor was hilarious in the moment, but the more I thought about it, the more I didn't like it.  The Mandarin should have been a towering supervillain!  The movie tells us he's just an ad campaign.  The Mandarin doesn't actually exist.  Boooooooo!  *throws popcorn*

The vice president (Miguel Ferrer) and his crappy motivation for working with Killian.  He decides to join forces with this criminal and commit treason because his daughter is missing a limb?  What?  In the aftermath of Boston, this isn't just bad storytelling.  It's a freaking insult.  Compare with Jeff Bauman, Jr. who lost both his legs in the bombing and then helped the authorities identify the perps behind it.  Screw you, Iron Man 3 writers, for putting in this horrible plot point.  Treason in return for creepy Extremis tech that might regrow your kid's leg but just as likely might turn her into a raging monster?  Mr. VP isn't getting any Father of the Year awards any time soon.

Tony and home security: What, you have all that tech everywhere and you couldn't see three helicopters coming?  What, you were taken by surprise after you gave out your home address on live TV in a challenge to the Mandarin?  Come on.  

The House Party Protocol.  Yes, it was all kinds of special effects eye candy fun to see those Iron Man suits zooming everywhere.  Wheeeee!  But if Tony had all those suits ready to go in his basement, primed to fly to him at a word, then it completely deflates the importance of the one battered suit he had in Tennessee.  He spends a great deal of time and effort lugging this broken shell around and trying to fix it. It's a moving sequence: See how much he has riding on this one suit!  It's all he has left after the attack on his house that destroys his workshop! But the narrative impact of the entire thing vanishes the moment we see that hey! it was totally unnecessary!  There's a whole freaking army of operational suits just waiting for the signal!

Is EVERYBODY wearing an Iron Man suit these days? (Rhodey, Pepper, Killian, the President?)  OK, is EVERYBODY wearing an Iron Man suit EXCEPT IRON MAN?  While we're at it, the whole remote-control suit business sent me into a hateful froth.  I just spent a whole sequence invested in a suit because I thought Tony was in it, and then *pop* Haha, it was just a remote-controlled shell, and the actual Tony was safe as houses off-site.  SCREW YOU.

The pat ending. Pepper's been riddled with Extremis tech, and the movie glosses over the aftermath.  All it says is that offscreen she was (somehow!) fixed.  How?  What, you just pull a medical miracle out of a hat and cure Pepper with no complications or ramifications?  That girl fell hundreds of feet into a fireball and turned into a glowing super-human.  You think that's not going to leave a mark?  Require therapy?  Something?

While we're at it, the same pat ending says that Tony got surgery to extract the shrapnel from his chest so he no longer needs his mini-arc reactor to keep them away from his heart.  Just how long has this medical technology been around, anyway?  Are you trying to tell me that Tony could have at any point decided to have this procedure?  Geez, that totally undercuts the whole idea that he's stuck with it, that he has to live with the consequences, that his arc-reactor heart is irreversibly a part of him now.  I thought part of the angst of Iron Man 2 was that as much as the arc reactor was keeping him alive, it was also slowly poisoning him - a great narrative complication.  

Re this PJ Media slam sent to me by a gentle reader.  Terrorism is not a joke, and it's not a punchline.  Is this some kind of loopy far-left David Sirota-like denialist fantasy where the foreign terrorist kingpin turns out to be the puppet of a very white, very Western nutjob?  who has former soldiers (e.g., James Badge Dale as Savin) acting as his evil minions to boot? who also turns his minions into human bombs?  It's insulting.  The Mandarin, despite the name, is dressed up like a proper Middle Eastern terrorist.  Don't try to tell me this wasn't intentional.

OK, some of you might argue that in the first Iron Man, Obadiah Stane was the evil white dude.  He was.  He was in cahoots with Raza, but it's pretty clear that Raza and his gang of thugs are Middle Eastern terrorists with their own agenda, not Stane's puppets.  They're perfectly happy to use his weapons tech to achieve their own goals, and they happened to get played by Stane.  The movie was in other places unambiguous that these guys are busy oppressing and murdering the natives in what looks an awful lot like real-world tribalist violence.

Well, that's that.  Here's looking forward to Star Trek: Into Darkness!