After the semi-disappointing Avengers, I was more than a little worried that another legendary director would let me down. Shane Black, Iron Man 3's director, has worked with Robert Downey Jr. before in one of my favorite comedies, Kiss Kiss Bang Bang. And if you haven't seen this masterwork of a film, I suggest you drop everything and go watch it right now. Finish reading my blog post, though. I need the hits. I was also worried about another great film franchise dying a slow and painful death, like the year's first travesty, A Good Day to Die Hard. So I went into the theater understandably apprehensive.
And as I so often am these days, I was disappointed: Iron Man 3 is bad as fuck. First off, it gives very little depth to the basically one-dimensional character of Tony Stark, giving him silly anxiety attacks after the events of The Avengers. Secondly, the franchise finally had a massive setback (not quite on the level of The Avengers) in the form of Ben Kingsley as The Mandarin, an Osama bin Laden-Mummar Qadaffi mix who blows s**t up across the country on a regular basis... and then turns out to not even be the main villain. If this guy had been the actual bad guy, it would have been epic. But instead, the villain is some nerd who Tony Stark stood up one night. How exciting.
Tony's bodyguard is the victim of one of The Mandarin's bombs, and he puts out a message to The Mandarin, telling him that he isn't afraid. And so The Mandarin blows up his house. It's an incredibly sad scene, as this monumental bachelor pad, the very symbol of superhero-level decadence, is razed to the ground. Stark ends up flying to Tennessee, where he discovers that the bombs aren't bombs-- they're actually failed experiments.
Apparently, someone is giving amputees treatments that will allow them to magically regrow their limbs, but sometimes they 'overheat' and blow the f**king hell up. This is where the plot starts to unravel. Guy Pearce, the villain, has created an army of evil former-cripples... but how did they turn evil? Do we just assume that if an amputee is given new limbs, they will automatically turn evil? It makes not an ounce of sense.
In the final scenes, Stark saves the president from being killed (and stops Guy Pearce from installing the vice-president as a puppet leader), and Pepper Potts gets the limb-regrowing treatment. So instead of just sitting around like she did in The Avengers, she gets to kill Guy Pearce by blowing him up with a .50 caliber shell. Ben Kingsley and the VP are arrested, and everyone goes home happy.
So, what did I think? Well, as always, I loved RDJ as Tony Stark, and Ben Kingsley sure as hell didn't hurt anything. However, it too often delved into the range of generic action movies with the final ridiculous sequence. What's great about the Iron Man series is that it centers more around the characters than the explosions. But the final battle in this one was almost... dare I say it... reminiscent of Transformers. Still, the cast is great, it's funny, it's witty, and you shouldn't listen to the fanboys complaining about how it "Doesn't adhere to the comics." Nobody gives a flying f**k.
Final score for Iron Man 3? 5/10 stars. It's actually better than the second one, but at the end of the day, that's not saying much. The acting is good, but the silly plot and utterly ludicrous action sequences completely overshadow anything the movie is trying to do. But really, all it's trying to do is entertain. And on that front, sure, it succeeded. But much like this year's The Wolverine, this movie is nothing more than intermittent entertainment to tide Marvel fans over to The Avengers 2.
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