Unreal Movie Review: Iron Man 3
“Nothing’s been the same since New York.”
It’s true not only for the fictional America we find in Marvel’s movies, that tends to happens when aliens attack a major city, but it’s true for the movies themselves. How do you go about making new films in the universe after the spectacle that was The Avengers?
Iron Man 3 is the first experiment in doing so, and by all accounts, it’s a success.
If we’re being honest here, the Iron Main strain of films is really the only reason The Avengers exists in the first place. Favreau’s first film was a wonderful surprise, and blew everyone’s expectations away despite being about hero relatively few used to care about. If it hadn’t been such a smash hit, it’s unlikely The Avengers would have ever assembled as quickly as they did.
It’s Robert Downey Jr’s charisma that carries these films. Hemsworth and Evans may look like Thor and Captain America respectively, but no one’s tuning in just to see them read their lines. But Tony Stark? That’s a different matter altogether, and Iron Man 3 shows that there isn’t much Downey Jr. can do wrong in the role.
New York is barely mentioned in the film, and when it is, it sparks chronic anxiety attacks in Tony as he flashes back to nearly dying in the wormhole above the city. But he must brush away his health ailments to deal with a new threat. And he doesn’t have a super team to back him up this time around.
The foils here are a pair of bad guys with their own special set of skills. There’s Aldrich Killian (Guy Pearce) a brilliant scientist who has developed a compound that allows the wounded to regrow body parts and heal from nearly any wound. The problem is that there are the tiny little side effects of psychosis, superhuman strength, the ability to melt objects (or people) with magma-like skin and the fact that overdose results in spontaneous combustion. Oops.
The formula creates human weapons better than it heals injuries, and so Killian works out a deal with radical terrorist, the Mandarin (Ben Kingsley), who is blowing up various US interests around the world and constantly interrupting the airways with his propaganda videos.
When the Mandarin injuries Stark’s bodyguard Happy (Jon Favreau, no longer directing) in an explosion, Stark declares war. Unfortunately, the war comes to him as his cliffside house is blown to bits by assault helicopters as he and Pepper (Gwyneth Paltrow) barely escape with their lives.
Much of the film has Tony Stark out of his element. With nearly all his suits destroyed, he’s stuck with one that barely works and definitely can’t fly. Tony has to take on bad guys using some combination of his fists, traditional guns, a homemade suit assembled from hardware store materials, or at best, one of his power gloves or boots. For the first portion of the film, you’ll hardly see him in a full set of armor at all.
The film is funny, as we’ve come to expect from the series, and really, these films are practically more comedy than action at this point, as 80% of all Tony Stark’s lines are sarcastic quips that he fires off like machine gun rounds. But it’s great. There’s a place for dark and brooding with Nolan’s Batman or Snyder’s Superman, but Iron Man movies have always just been flat out fun.
You can debate whether or not this is the best movie of the trilogy. I quite liked Guy Pearce’s Aldrich Killian as a villain, certainly more than Jeff Bridges’ stoic Obadiah Stane, but perhaps a bit less Sam Rockwell’s dance happy Justin Hammer.
I was excited to see Ben Kingsley’s Mandarin in action, as his monologues were chilling in the trailers and I hoped he’d be the most memorable villain the series has to date. But his character takes a turn that should catch everyone off guard, and I’m afraid I can’t be less cryptic than that. I was a bit disappointed he didn’t get more of a chance to shine, but his role allows the plot as a whole to be the most interesting of all the films to date.
As for action? The film can feel a bit slow in between explosions some times, but the payoff of the final fight sequence featuring a few dozen of Tony’s suits is simply astonishing. It’s absolutely the best Marvel fight scene since The Avengers defended New York, and in terms of sheer creativity, it might even be better.
Many were worried with Jon Favreau leaving the series (as a director) and Shane Black stepping in that the film would suffer, but Black directed Downey Jr. in Kiss Kiss Bang Bang, and knows how to bring one hell of a performance out of his friend. Tony Stark has never been better than in Iron Man 3, and subsequently we get yet another film that’s better than anyone expected.
4 out of 5 stars
” It’s absolutely the best Marvel fight scene since The Avengers defended New York” it’s the best fight scene…since the last fight scene. Sorry to nitpick a good review but that was just kinda funny to me.
*Spoilers*
I for one do not think we’ve seen the last of the mandarin. In fact I wouldn’t be shocked to see Ben Kingsley as the main villain in The Avengers 2. I just think there are layers to his performance that imply a bluff with the actor angle. I may be completely off base but why would Killian and Maya call him “the master” privately when thy had no reason to keep up that rise? And where did Killian get the money for all his research. I’m just saying that I wouldn’t be shocked to see him again.
*end spoilers*
I’m in total agreement with this assessment.
This really feels like a film that’s out of its element, and that’s a good thing, it was time to do something new with the Iron Man series.
It was nice having Iron Man, a mechanical superhero, up against biologically engineered bad guys, and seeing how they clashed.
*spoilers, maybe*
I concur with what Sam said, something seemed very off from the beginning. He was caught so easily too. We may be reaching, but the Mandarin might be back. At least, I hope so.
And I really didn’t like the whole Extremis thing with Pepper Potts. But perhaps I expect loss in superhero movies nowadays, which is probably revealing about me.
*end spoilers*
It definitely was a “feel good” movie and easily worth the price of admittance.
PS: I know these characters are American creations, but I’d like to see a focus on villains affecting other places, not just somewhere in the Middle East. Has me slightly concerned with Thanos (whenever he shows up). He’ll probably threaten another major US city. Pacific Rim looks it gets the global scale right, in the trailers.
I thought it was pretty cool was how the anxiety attacks basically took the place of Tony’s alcoholism from “Demon in a Bottle”. Nice little nod.
*SPOILERS**SPOILERS**SPOILERS**SPOILERS**SPOILERS**SPOILERS*
I’m gonna give you some leeway here Paul, because you really wouldn’t know how iconic The Mandarin is to the “Iron Man” Mythos. That being said, the my issue with “Iron Man 3” is that we’re led to believe that The Vice President was willing to commit treason and trust a wack job with an scientifically unstable treatment just so his daughter could walk? That was pretty stupid and really made no sense.
And despite the fact that I like Guy Pearce too…Aldrich Killian is NOT a villain worth a post Avengers movie. The Mandarin would have been perfect since he’s just as smart as Tony Stark, just as rich as Tony Stark and is actually skilled in several forms of Martial Arts…which Tony is not. The Mandarin is the biggest, baddest threat in the Iron Man series and for good reason and this movie basically turned him into a joke for no reason and eliminated the potential to use a truly interesting and powerful character for a C Grade character like Aldrich Killian.
The best scene of the movie (when The Mandarin held a public execution on live television and basically told The President to go F*** himself by killing the guy anyway) that was truly chilling and for the writer to completely back down from that was not only a poor choice in action but completely cowardly. In a post Avengers world things need to be darker, harder and more challenging, Tony Stark going head to head with his Foreign terrorist equal would have been awesome! Instead we got nothing but jokes and plot that looks like it came from the scrap heap of a failed Season for “24”…
I can understand why some didn’t like it. I did feel like it was a little TOO funny at times. Particularly with the Mandarin twist. I really wanted him to be a badass villain.
Havent seen it yet but was there a Stan Lee cameo?
Yeah there was. He was a judge at a bikini contest. Which really only existed so he could be a judge at it.
Ugo- I have to agree. I was half expecting Michael Westen (or Sam Axe) from Burn Notice to show up since they were in Miami. Overall I enjoyed it, but I would have preferred an actual Mandarin to the comedic version we got. Kingsley’s a fabulous actor, he would have made a great international terrorist – I felt his talent was somewhat wasted. Still a solid film, though.
One of the main reasons why I didn’t like it was the plot holes. Think about it for a while and you can come up with a dozen, and even though some of them can be easily ignored, others are just unforgivable, in my opinion.
The greatest problem that I had with the film is that it tried to be something it wasn’t. They tried to add more depth and humanity to Tony Stark by showing how affected he was by the events in The Avengers and and by showing him sort of “defeated” after his housed is destroyed and we see the suits blowing up. However, due to one of the plot holes mentioned earlier, we know that he was never really defeated and the hole PTSD issue that was presented during the first 50 min of the movie is just completely ignored by the end.
The action was great (although even the final battle was full of plot holes), the comedy was great and RD Jr, as always, was the best part, but I just could not stand an Iron Man movie trying to be something else and failing.
You keep using that word, plot hole, I do not think it means what you think it means. The one example you used, the suits being destroyed then saving him at the end, is clearly not a plot hole since it shows that he had a huge underground bunker full of suits. The ones on the surface were destroyed and never used again. If you could share some more examples from the “dozens” you noticed I would love to hear them. Not trying to sound condescending at all but I’m just sick of people using that word to describe every single mistake in a movie. Plus, if you’re entertained then any mistake like that doesn’t fucking matter because the movie still accomplished its goal.
@Sam
*SPOILERS*
Here are some of the plot holes I noticed throughout the film:
1. Stark reactivates Jarvis while fixing it at that kid’s garage, yet it does not use it to call any of the suits that were hidden underground until the very end. (This is the one I was talking about in my comment. He wasn’t really “defeated” as he had a whole bunch of suits hidden)
2. The fact that the suits are now able to be activated remotely means that the Arc Reactor is completely unnecessary and in the end it turns out that removing it from his chest was Tony’s solution to his PTSD?
3. There are hundreds of Extremis “soldiers” fighting the AI suits while Tony is doing his thing and apparently they did a pretty good job, since we don’t see any of them (the bad guys) by the end. However Tony is unable to defeat Killian with like three suits.
4. Oh, yeah, and where where those suits when Tony was having his ass handed to him? Just flying around? In the end he blows them up, so you know they are there.
5. And when Pepper saves Tony, what exactly happens to Killian? She just hit him with some metal pipe and forgot about him.
6. The movie tries to give Killian a motive for his actions, but in the end I just didn’t see one (maybe this one is just me).
7. If this was such a big deal (which I guess it was since the freakin’ US President was kidnapped) where were the rest of The Avengers? (I know this is an IM movie and I certainly didn’t expect the rest of the team to show up, but Killian’s was such a huge display that it just doesn’t fit if you think about it)
8. When Rhodes learns that the Iron Patriot suit is being used by someone else to kill the president, why, out of all people, would he call the vice president? And even still, why only him?
9. After he challenges The Mandarin publicly he just stands in his house (the same address he just gave away) biting his nails and completely unprepared. Even when that woman (I forgot her name) rings the bell, he opens the door scared that it might be The Mandarin, so we know that he is expecting him, yet he is without his suit.
I’m getting tired of writing these down, and I can only think of 2 more (so, you’re right, it was not a dozen, as I said). Besides, I think I’ve made my point.
@Filosoraptor
1- Under a pile of beton – no radio signal – broken armor’s network ability – Annoying if you have Deus Ex Machina in the middle of the movie.
2-Tony’s solution to end PTSD was not removing the reactor, it’s just a symptom of his new self
3- I think the comics says Tony used extremis to inject himself the armor as a nano stuff, hence: I am Iron Man
4- They were busy – deal with it
5- she kicks him with a pipe then throws an anti tank rocket at the guy… did you actually watch?
6- here a motive: he is a bad guy… You’re probably right: it’s just you 🙂
7 – Kilian is not a huge display he was invisible, the mandarin: just another terrorist: the avengers are not team america: world police
8- why not? maybe they are buddy? maybe it is his boss? If you call the boss of your boss and the dude tells you, I’m taking care of it, do you immediatly question him and let his N=1 know?
9- It’s Tony Stark he does dumb stuff – deal with it (besides he did have his suit).
Congratulation you lost 2 internets and 25 watts for nothing.
I think Justin Hammer was my favorite villain too. I am beginning to think picking on Iron Man 2 is just a meme or people just jumping on the bandwagon and not wanting to be an outcast…but you know what? The best villains were in 2, War Machine was in it and actually did stuff in it, AND Don Cheadle is a better actor than Terrance Howard.
3 was a close second though. Didn’t think much of Killian other than what he did and was capable of. Enjoyed his origins and stuff, but other than that I don’t remember much about him. The Mandarin twist was GENIUS to me.
@Filosoraptor
I can understand why someone would have trouble with those plot holes, and find a reason to let them detract from their enjoyment of the film.
For myself however, I guess the tone of the universe plus the over-the-top action and (IMHO) how well done and “cool” the action scenes were just overrode those issues and I just found the movie immensely enjoyable. Probably my favorite Marvel movie aside from the first Iron Man and the Avengers.
This is in stark contrast to Dark Knight Rises, which has just as many if not more and utterly non-sensical plot holes. When a movie sets itself up to take place in such a realistic universe but then just kind of craps over the idea of logic and common sense while not really offering anything in it’s place (humour, well-done action, etc…), THEN I get bothered by the plot holes like you mentioned.
Overall I enjoyed it, but felt there was a tad too much comedy. Also the mandarin twist was awful.
My biggest gripe though is how his suits are all pieces of crap now. He’s been blown up by rockets and aliens and other tech suits and crazy Russians, and he just got a few scratches, but in this one, they fall apart when falling from the sky, getting hit by a truck, getting punched by abad guy with lava skin. Sure, you can say they are all experimental work in progress suits, but it was still kinda sad.
On the same note, I hate, but understand, how tony is always using a new incomplete suit. He’s compulsive with the suits and obsessively builds new ones, but I am so tired of hearing Jarvis say “sorry tony that function isn’t working yet” or “sorry tony, this suit isn’t complete/fully charged”. You’d figure he’d learn and use the prior suit until the next suit is fully functional.
To those who say “too much comedy” … Did u know u were watching iron man? THE CHARACTER IS FUNNY n i love that aspect about the films… If i wanted pure serious ide watch batman … The whole mandarin twist i didnt care for but still love the movie overall.. Most ppl hated on iron man 2 n thats one of my fav movies period
i had many minor complaints with ironman 3, none im going to go into because they all sum up to artistic interpretation. But my main problem with I3 was the mandarin. Now if it had been any other villain, maybe one of his more ridiculous villains, i probably wouldve been cool with the twist, but the mandarin? You just pissed off a whole bunch of nerds, mandarin is the luthor to ironman, his very existence challenges tony. It would’ve been much better to stick closer to the extremis storyline in the comics and have the mandarin as a final boss rather than the what they did with him, as a movie it was straight epic, but i cant forgive that, they had a history to respect and i felt like they disrespected it. To me it was the onky thing keeping it from being a 5/5. I gave it an honest 4/5.