Movie Review: Iron Man 3 *Spoilers*

This review is full of Spoilers

I seem to have a minority opinion of Iron Man 3, but it just didn't work for me. I liked some of the ideas and character development but I thought the action sequences didn't make much sense and the villain's scheme was at the level of the Underpants Gnomes business plan. Writers have to remember that was a joke and not duplicate it in a non-comedy.

I did like what they did with Tony Stark. I like the idea of PTSD after the events of The Avengers. It's a good substitute for the classic alcoholism stories in the comics and it connects it to the other Marvel films while still allowing this to be a film about just one character. It should also be relevant to the nation today, but I think it doesn't treat it seriously enough to get much credit for that. I've seen a number of documentaries about the issue and a lot of people in the country are dealing with the effects of PTSD (directly or indirectly) and I think Iron Man 3 just treats it as a plot excuse. Also, I think it's not at all resolved at the end of the film. The final battle, where he thinks he loses Pepper for a while should keep him dealing with such issues for a long time. Update: Here's everything you ever wanted to know about Iron Man and PTSD.

Robert Downey Jr. is of course a great Tony Stark. The script gives him lots of banter, a few different emotions (instead of just arrogance) and lots of time both with and without the armor. I've seen complaints that there was too little Iron Man in this film but I don't think that's the case. While I did laugh a number of times, I thought the banter was too forgettable (I can't remember any line that made me laugh). There's a stretch where he works with a young boy and while the boy was fine, I think Tony's snarkiness when directed at a child, came off as offensive rather than entertaining (e.g, "Dads leave. No need to be such a pussy about it.").

As for the other characters, well there are lot of them so I felt they all got too little screen time. The repartee between Tony and Pepper is always a highlight of Iron Man (even in The Avengers) but there wasn't a lot of it. There are five different villains that have enough time that they're differentiable. Most of their time though is spent setting up their plot twist. I do give them lots of credit for stunt casting Ben Kingsley as The Mandarin only to have it be a fake out. Once he revealed himself to be an actor, I kept waiting for him to reveal himself as the real mastermind. It kept me interested.

I'm surprised but I found the terrorism stuff a bit disturbing. Maybe it's because of the recent Boston Marathon bombing, but ok, terrorism is supposed to be disturbing. At least my theater didn't do anything stupid like this one in Missouri.

What was the villain trying to do? He said he'd have the world's most powerful leader and terrorist in his hands and be able to play one off the other. Huh? The Mandarin was a sham, so who exactly did he have there? Maybe it was just to sell tons of weapons to the US government to fight a sham, but AIM was already selling lots of weapons to the government. Why did he need to go through all those crazy machinations to achieve his goals? He apparently bribed the Vice President with a promise to grow back his daughter's leg, but I guess just having the VP in his pocket isn't enough, so he needed to kill the president and make the VP become president. So with a superpower like turning into molten whatever, he has to... make the president call him during an on-air hostage situation (which seemed completely pointless), blow up Air Force One, but first secretly kidnap the President to put him in the Iron Patriot suit hung over a dock to have him killed while no one is watching (cause then wouldn't SHIELD just show up and rescue him)?

My biggest problem was with the action sequences. Maybe I've seen too much Mythbusters, but too often they just didn't make sense. I don't see how Happy survived the explosion given where he was and that he was hiding behind a cart that was blown away. I didn't buy everyone falling in slow motion and dealing with the house falling apart how it did or how his glove flew off and pulled him out of underwater wreckage (with jets facing the wrong way). In Miami he's waiting for his armor to fly from Tennessee and a glove and boot make it, but the rest is trapped in the locked barn. So how did the two pieces get out and why couldn't the others? And why couldn't the rest break through a window or wall? (And why couldn't he fly one of the other 41 suits to him like he did later).

My favorite fight was the one with Tony in Tennessee against the two underlings. I wish it was shot a little slower but it worked, and Tony used his brain. Contrast that to the rest of the Iron Man scenes.

Twelve people fall from a plane, I'll accept comic book physics to say they're fine until impact, but Jarvis says Tony can only carry four of them. Tony somehow manages to carry all twelve by having them hold hands and electrocuting their hands (not them). Because I'm sure the issue about only carrying four was nothing to do with weight but more to do with grasping.

And then for shock value Iron Man is hit by a truck and the armor falls apart (it doesn't do that when hit by the Hulk) and it turns out Tony was controlling it remotely, just to make you go wow. Maybe they do it to explain how Tony has advanced the technology, but we saw even more automatic control back in the house. And if he can control it remotely, why ever fly in it?

Then there's the big finale. While it wasn't shaky cam, it was constant quick cuts and the action didn't make much sense. First there's the idea. Having 42 suits of armor fly in and attack is kinda cool, and there are nods for comics fans to various suits, but they're all treated generically. So now we have fully autonomous suits and I suppose that's to be expected in the age of drones and with the capabilities of Jarvis that's always been in these films, but if that's the case just why does Tony need to be Iron Man? Maybe it's because Jarvis is not a strategist. You have Pepper and the President as hostages, so the suits just go in, attack and blow things up around them. I'm sure that's going to help. In fact the suits just ignore the hostages so that Rhodey and Tony need to do the rescuing. And then they're not good at it. Rhodey's rescue of the president is accidental at best. Tony doesn't rescue Pepper and doesn't defeat the bad guy (Pepper does both). Tony evens seems to put Rhodey at extra risk by not giving him a suit. He says it's only keyed to him (which I believe because in the beginning we see him give himself injections) but we see him give one to Pepper (twice) and then one to Killian!

There's one shot that sums up what I hate about the fight scenes and how they make no sense. In one shot, the Killian turns his arm into a sword (I think) and slices an Iron Man suit in two. The slice is from top to bottom and both halves fall away to the sides. He went through the whole suit. And yet, Tony was in it and is uncut, just suspended in the mid air as the suit falls away (until I think he falls into another suit). How did he cut through the front and the back, with one sword and not cut Tony in half?

Tony Stark won the final battle in Iron Man I because he outthought his opponent ("How did you solve the icing problem?") I don't even think he won the final battle here, Pepper did, with fighting skills that came from nowhere.

The closing credits are in the style of the credits of a 70s TV show (Charlies Angels, Swat). Why? Iron Man was created in the 60s and the movie treats 1999 as the distant past. In spite of the fact that there are some trappings of deep themes, too much of this film just made no sense.