Ironman was the first movie to start Marvel’s foray as a Movie production house. Everyone loved it and it set the stage for what was to come. Ironman 2 was an all right followup, but was definitely lacking in some places. But with Ironman 3 being the first Marvel film to follow the epic Avengers blockbuster from last summer, expectations couldn’t be higher.
When we meet Tony here, he’s been hard at work and now has an armory full of Ironman suits. He and Pepper are a full fledged couple, and War Machine (now known as the Iron Patriot) is a public face for the US Military. What better time to introduce his arch nemesis the terrorist the Mandarin.
There were a lot of things this movie did well. For the first half of the movie the Mandarin was one of the more interesting villains of the franchise. Every time he appeared on screen, you knew shit was about to hit the fan and he has some of the most intense scenes in the movie. Robert Downy Jr. gave another great performance as Tony Stark which was no surprise at all. Humor also remains a strong suit of this franchise.
Another thing that’s expected at this point is the advancements in the armor. Stark’s really come a long way if you look at the tech he had in the first movie. His armor comes to him at will now. It comes in handy in the great sequence you probably remember from the trailers where is house is crumbling around him.
Now for what I didn’t like. Those tech advancements that I just mentioned also cause one of the things I like the least about this movie. His armor is falling apart and misbehaving throughout pretty much the whole movie. They use it as a way to add comic relief and as a reason for Stark to not be in the armor, but to me it makes the suits seem crappy and ineffective. They try to use it as a way to show that Tony is the thing that makes Ironman formidable, but his armors are fighting his battles for him sometimes now and it doesn’t even seem like he has anything to do with the battles going on around him in one sequence. The kid and the post traumatic stress stuff got annoying too.
War machine is also one of my favorite Marvel characters and I wasn’t happy with how they treated him here. Don Cheadle did a great job with what he was given to do though. For instance, Tony is able to take on all kinds of threats with no armor and no hand to hand combat training, but Rhodey gets knocked out with one hit as soon as he jumps out of the suit and he has military training. Tony has all these suits flying around, but says he can’t give Rhodey one even though he jus did that for pepper at the beginning of the movie. So both characters spend most of the movie with no armor. This was a missed opportunity to show other iterations of the WM armor. Plus they made the armor look stupid by changing its colors.
Also I wasn’t too big a fan of the Twist or the Extremis stuff. I think they shouldn’t have tried to use Mandarin and Extremis in the same movie. They should have done one at a time and I think they could have had two much more focused films. If this will indeed be the last solo outing for RDJ’s Ironman, I’m glad they tried to give the fans what they wanted by attempting those story lines and characters.
As an action movie, I think Ironman 3 was great and I think anyone would love it. The comic book nerd in me can’t get over how some of the characters were treated though. Never-the-less I’m going to reccomend this because watching RDJ play Stark never gets old.
